Marianne Gray

Alive and kicking | 10 April 2010

Marianne Gray talks to Debbie Reynolds, one of the last of Hollywood’s Golden Era

Marianne Gray talks to Debbie Reynolds, one of the last of Hollywood’s Golden Era

Debbie Reynolds is the first to admit she’s no longer Tammy. At 78, she’s more like the Unsinkable Molly Brown as she tours Britain this month in her one-woman show, Alive and Fabulous.

‘You people in England probably think I died years ago but I’m still kicking,’ she says, laughing. ‘I know that a lot of young people don’t know who I am unless they’ve noticed me as Grace’s mother, Bobbi Adler, in the sitcom Will & Grace, but I’ve never stopped working. I’m an Aries and it’s in my nature to be a performer.

‘I’ve worked for 62 years and the only change is that nowadays I only do one show a day, not two or three like I did in the old days,’ she tells me. ‘I’d wither away and die if I wasn’t working. When I kick the bucket they’re going to stuff me like Trigger [Roy Rogers’s horse] and put me in a museum. If you put a quarter in my mouth I’ll sing you “Tammy”. I just love performing!’

Her second husband said of her: ‘Debbie is always on. Every time the fridge door opens and the light goes on, she takes a bow and does 20 minutes.’ I run the story past her and she shrieks with delight.

‘Oh, that’s an old joke. All my friends say, “She’ll perform anywhere,” and it’s true. People like me and Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, all those who have worked in nightclubs, we’re used to performing. Give us a party or a piano and we’re off.’

In her show, which she describes as a full-on energy show, she sings to clips of films like Singin’ in the Rain and Tammy and the Bachelor, dances to a medley of 1940s songs, reminisces in front of MGM movie-excerpts and does impressions of friends like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and all the Gabors, especially Zsa Zsa, who is aunt to heiress-socialite Paris Hilton, and gives her troubled niece advice on how to talk to policemen and stay out of jail.

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