Gisele MacKenzie, variety-show star, dies at 76
Miss MacKenzie, who was once known as Canada's First Lady of Song, died Friday in Providence St. Joseph's Medical Center in Burbank after a long battle with colon cancer, said her daughter, Gigi Downs.
Miss MacKenzie rose to national attention on television in "Your Hit Parade."
During her years on the weekly show, from 1953 to 1957, she joined vocalists such as Snooky Lanson, Russell Arms and Dorothy Collins in singing the seven most popular songs in America each week.
Although most of the show's singers were recording artists, Miss MacKenzie was the only one to ever have a big enough hit to appear in the show's top seven while she was a regular: "Hard to Get" in 1955.
In 1957, she starred in her own NBC musical-variety program, "The Gisele MacKenzie Show," which lasted six months. She later was a regular on "The Sid Caesar Show," a 1963 ABC comedy-variety show.
"She was such a lovely lady," Caesar said Friday. "She was a wonderfully, wonderfully talented woman. She was a great singer and a great musician and had a great sense of humor."
On his show, Caesar said, "She sang, played the violin, worked in the sketches — she did everything."
Actress Beverly Garland, a close friend of Miss MacKenzie, said she was an incredible performer.
"The wonderful thing about Gisele was she could sing no matter where she was," Garland said Friday.
"She didn't have to have a piano, she didn't have to have a violin or anything. She was on key and so brilliant that it just blew your mind."
The daughter of a Winnipeg, Manitoba, doctor, she was born Jan. 10, 1927. Miss MacKenzie — a family name that she adopted after coming to Hollywood in 1951 — inherited her musical talent from her mother, who played piano and organ. As a child, she began singing and playing the piano and violin at an early age.
She gave her first public recital as a violinist at a hotel in Winnipeg and studied at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto.
While entertaining troops during World War II, she met Robert Shuttleworth, a lieutenant who was a bandleader in the Royal Canadian Navy. He told her to look him up after the war. She did, and he hired her as a violinist, pianist and vocalist with his band.
Shuttleworth became Miss MacKenzie's first manager and they later married and divorced. She also was married to Robert Klein, a businessman, whom she also divorced.
In 1946, her rich contralto singing voice caught the attention of the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., which resulted in her own quarter-hour radio show, "Meet Gisele."
By 1951, she was in Hollywood doing radio guest spots with Edgar Bergen and Morton Downey before becoming a regular on Bob Crosby's "Club 15" show and then as featured singer on "The Mario Lanza Show" on radio.
An impressed Jack Benny had her join him on tour in 1952 and 1953. And the comedian, who became Miss MacKenzie's biggest booster, recommended her for "Your Hit Parade."
In 1955, Miss MacKenzie made the first of many appearances on Benny's weekly television show, and she often performed a violin duet with him.
Over the decades, she starred in numerous regional theater productions of "Mame," "Gypsy," "The King and I," "Hello, Dolly" and other musicals.
She made her dramatic debut in a 1955 "Kraft Television Theatre" production and appeared regularly on television into the 1990s, on such shows as "Studio One," "The Hollywood Squares," "Murder, She Wrote," "MacGyver" and "Boy Meets World."
Survivors include her daughter and a son, Mac Shuttleworth.
Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.