Helen Gallagher, who parlayed her song-and-dance skills into Tony Award-winning performances in revivals of the musicals “Pal Joey” and “No, No, Nanette,” and who turned to television to play the matriarch on the long-running soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” when theater no longer provided her a living, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 98.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Patti Specht, a friend and the executor of her will.
Ms. Gallagher was 18 when she made her Broadway debut in 1944, in the chorus of a Cole Porter revue, “Seven Lively Arts.” Over the next several decades, she worked with an A-list group of choreographers, including Jerome Robbins (“High Button Shoes”), Agnes de Mille (“Brigadoon”), Bob Fosse (“Sweet Charity”) and Donald Saddler (“No, No, Nanette”).
Ms. de Mille nearly fired her from “Brigadoon” in 1947. “Agnes wanted very lyrical work, and I’d just done ‘Billion Dollar Baby’ and everything came out bumps and grinds,” Ms. Gallagher told The New York Times in 1971.
But in 1958, when she played Ado Annie, her favorite role, in a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” at New York City Center, she unexpectedly earned Ms. de Mille’s praise.
“She came in and restaged ‘All Er Nuthin’ for me, and she made it a little dance beside the song,” Ms. Gallagher said on the Behind the Curtain theater podcast in 2017.
“She sent me an orchid on opening night,” she added, with a note saying, “‘You are truly a star.’”
By then, Ms. Gallagher had been a Tony Award winner for six years. In 1952, she had portrayed the bitter chorus girl Gladys Bumps in a revival of “Pal Joey,” the Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical about a notorious, womanizing nightclub owner, Joey Evans, who is targeted by Ms. Gallagher’s character and a mobster in a revenge scheme.
Reviewing the show for The Daily News, John Chapman called Ms. Gallagher a “natural born imp, who can dance anything, be very funny and sing.”
She won the Tony that year for best featured actress in a musical.
But the award did not guarantee continued Broadway success. She followed “Pal Joey” with “Hazel Flagg,” a screwball comedy about a young woman who becomes famous when she is erroneously believed to be sick from radium poisoning.
In The Times, Brooks Atkinson wrote that Ms. Gallagher, “who was inflaming ‘Pal Joey’ until quite recently, is now igniting the title part, especially when the plot lets her go into one of her spinning dances.”
But the show closed after 190 performances — she called it a flop — and she returned to Broadway in 1955 to replace Carol Haney in “The Pajama Game” and later to star in the musical “Portofino,” which shuttered after three performances in 1958.
Ms. Gallagher was then absent from Broadway for nearly a decade — she sang in clubs and took dancing lessons in the intervening years — until she was cast as Nickie, a dancer who is Charity Hope Valentine’s best friend in “Sweet Charity.” She was also the understudy for Gwen Verdon in the title role and replaced her in 1967.
In his review in The Times, Vincent Canby wrote that Ms. Gallagher “sings and dances with undiminished vitality” and that her Charity, a dance hall hostess looking for love, was “sweeter, more realistic, less eccentric” that Ms. Verdon’s.
Helen Hudson Gallagher was born on July 19, 1926, in Brooklyn and grew up in the Bronx and Scarsdale. Her father, Charles, was a banker who lost his job during the Great Depression. Her mother, Helen (Hudson) Gallagher, was a bank clerk. Their financial difficulties led to the loss of their house in Scarsdale and divorce.
Wanting to dance from a young age — in particular, on Broadway — Helen began studying at the School of American Ballet as a teenager. But she was shy and asthmatic and needed prodding from ballet school friends to audition for “Seven Lively Arts.”
She stayed busy in the 1940s and ’50s. One of her signature moments was in “High Button Shoes,” which opened in 1947, performing a humorous tango with Paul Godkin as their characters were learning the dance.
“We stopped the show,” she said on the podcast, adding that it made the star of the show, Nanette Fabray, jealous of the audience’s attention.
Nearly a quarter-century later, in 1971, Ms. Gallagher got the star turn that many critics thought she had long deserved, in “No, No, Nanette,” with Ruby Keeler (who had last been seen on Broadway in 1929), Patsy Kelly and Bobby Van.
Rex Reed wrote in The Daily News that Ms. Gallagher and Mr. Van, who performed “You Can Dance With Any Girl,” “turn ‘No, No, Nanette’ into Technicolor. When they dance, the carpets burn.”
Ms. Gallagher won the Tony for best actress in a leading role in a musical that year. But the lack of stage roles and the need to support herself led her to join the cast of “Ryan’s Hope” in 1975. She played Maeve Ryan, whose Irish American family owns a bar in Upper Manhattan.
“It gives me continuity in the thing that I chose to spend my life doing,” Ms. Gallagher told The Times in 1985. “I’ve done things on the show that I would be proud to put up against anything I’ve ever done onstage.”
“I remember having a speech over my son’s deathbed. It was absolutely O’Casey,” she added, referring to the Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey.
She remained on the series until it ended in 1989. In the final episode’s last scene, she sang “Danny Boy,” as she had done on the show’s St. Patrick’s Day episodes. At the end, she added, “Have a good life.”
She won three Daytime Emmys for her performance as Maeve Ryan, her most significant role in an otherwise modest film and TV career. It included a part in the Merchant-Ivory movie “Roseland” (1977), set in the New York’s Roseland ballroom, and guest appearances on the prime-time series “Law & Order and the daytime dramas “Another World” and “All My Children.”
In her final Broadway appearance, she replaced Ann Miller as the star of the musical “Sugar Babies,” in 1981.
For many years, Ms. Gallagher also taught acting and singing at HB Studio, the nonprofit West Village drama school, and at her apartment in Manhattan. In 2020, the studio named one of its classrooms for her.
She is survived by her brother, Charles. Her marriage in 1956 to Frank Wise, a stagehand, ended in divorce. Gardner Brooksbank, an actor who was her partner for about 40 years, died in 2019.
Ms. Gallagher viewed her Tony Award for “No, No, Nanette” as a symbol of perseverance — by her and others in the acting trade.
After Lauren Bacall handed her the statuette at the awards ceremony, Ms. Gallagher said: “This award is to all of us that have stuck in a business, maybe long after anybody wanted us. Stuck because we didn’t know what else to do — no imagination — stuck because we had to stick. It’s for us that stick.”
The post Helen Gallagher, Winner of Two Tonys and Three Emmys, Dies at 98 appeared first on New York Times.
