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Name: Bernadette Peters
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Date of Birth:
February 28, 1948
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Place of Birth:
Ozone Park, New York, USA
Mini-bio:
American actress Bernadette Peters was a five-year-old performer on Horn and Hardart's kiddie-talent radio program, and by age 11 was appearing on Broadway in Most Happy Fella. Peters achieved nationa... read morel fame in 1968 with her campy performance as Ruby, the 1930s-style chorus girl protagonist of the off-Broadway musical pastiche Dames at Sea. The role demonstrated only one aspect of her talents, but nonetheless threatened to typecast her as a squeaky-voiced dumb blonde. Bernadette scuttled that stereotype herself as leading lady in the 1969 Joel Grey musical George M. The following year she played Mabel Normand opposite Robert Preston's Mack Sennett in the musical comedy Mack and Mabel, which, though a failure, has become a staple of community theatres. (The amateur Mabels have an ongoing tendency to imitate Bernadette Peters). In 1976, Peters costarred with Richard Crenna on All's Fair, a Norman Lear TV sitcom that showed neither star to best advantage. Reluctant to leave her native New York City, Peters has nonetheless occasionally travelled to Hollywood for an off-and-on movie career. Hilarious as a babaloo-ing cabaret entertainer in Silent Movie (1976), the actress was even better as the long-suffering wife of goony Steve Martin in The Jerk (1977). She was reunited with Martin in Pennies From Heaven (1981), an uneven but fascinating attempt to juxtapose the fanatasies of 1930s popular music with the grim realities of Depression life. Offscreen, her relationship with Martin was intensely romantic for several years. Feeling unfulfilled in Hollywood, Bernadette Peters returned to Broadway in the mid 1980s, reclaiming her Dames at Sea prominence tenfold in such musicals as Sunday in the Park With George, Song and Dance, and Into the Woods, nearly unrecognizable in the latter in her heavy makeup as the wizened witch of "Hansel and Gretel" fame. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
Bernadette Peters mini-bio: Ms. Peters' mother, Marguerite, started her off in show business by putting her on the television show Juvenile Jury at the age of three-and-a-half. She later appeared on the television shows Name That Tune and The Horn and Hardart Children's Hour. She took tap lessons, and at the age of nine got her Equity Card, under the name of Bernadette Peters, to avoid ethnic stereotyping. The stage name was taken from her father's first name. In her teen years she attended the Quintano School for Young Professionals. She appeared on the stage in The Most Happy Fella (1959), was an understudy for Dainty June in the touring company of Gypsy, and appeared Off-Broadway in The Penny Friend (1966) and Curley McDimple (1967) and as an understudy on Broadway in The Girl In The Freudian Slip (1967). She made her on-stage Broadway debut in Johnny No-Trump in 1967. She received the Theatre World Award for a Debut Performance for her work in the Broadway musical George M! in 1968. But it was her next role, as "Ruby" in the 1968 Off-Broadway spoof of 1930s musicals, Dames at Sea, that brought her critical notice. (She had appeared in an earlier 1966 version of Dames at Sea at the off-off-Broadway performance space, the Caffe Cino.) 
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