Singer-actress Mary Healy dead at 96

Mary Healy, who for years called Las Vegas and performed on its showroom stages with husband Peter Lind Hayes, died Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 96.

The singer and actress worked with her husband in Las Vegas, mainly at the Sands, from 1947 into the 1960s, and they performed together on television, radio and in films as well. Hayes died in Las Vegas in 1998.

In 2006, Healy was inducted into the Nevada Entertainer/Artist Hall of Fame established by UNLV’s College of Fine Arts.

The duo first made their mark on television with the live “Inside U.S.A.” in 1949. Their TV credits include “The Peter Lind Hayes Show,” “The Star of the Family,” and the 1960 NBC sitcom “Peter Loves Mary.” On the big screen they were part of the Dr. Seuss cult fantasy “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T” and on Broadway they starred in “Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?”

Before the duo ever performed their musical comedy on a Las Vegas stage, they attended the grand opening of the El Rancho Vegas in 1941.

“We played the Last Frontier once, in 1947; played the Flamingo once; then we played the Sands 14 times,” Hayes said in a 1990 Review-Journal profile. “We played the Sands five weeks at a time, and that meant we had to work seven nights a week, twice a night. After five weeks, it got tiring.”

Healy was born in New Orleans on April 14, 1918. Crowned Miss New Orleans in 1935, she was then discovered by a 20th Century Fox talent scout, while singing at the historic Blue Room of the Roosevelt Hotel, according to her publicist, Wendy Morris.

She first appeared on screen in 1938 in “Josetta” and went on to act in more than 14 movies. She sang the title song as well as acting in the backstage-Hollywood movie “Star Dust,” 1940.

Hayes’ mother Grace Hayes was a Vaudeville headliner who performed in Las Vegas and eventually owned and operated a nightclub on the desert highway that became the Strip. “The south entrance to The Mirage — that was my mother’s place,” Hayes said in 1990.

The couple moved to Las Vegas to take care of Grace, first dividing their time between Las Vegas and New Rochelle, N.Y., which the public knew as the home base of their New York radio show. Grace died in 1989.

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.