Roxanne Rosedale, the glamorous model and actress who assisted host Bud Collyer on the 1950s game show Beat the Clock and appeared in the Marilyn Monroe-starring The Seven Year Itch, has died. She was 95.
Known professionally as Roxanne, she died May 2 in an assisted care facility in her birthplace of Minneapolis, her daughter Ann Roddy told The Hollywood Reporter.
Roxanne became a hugely popular TV star after she joined CBS’ Beat the Clock, from Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions, in 1950. She would introduce the contestants — who were tasked with completing complicated, outrageous stunts in an allotted time — snapped photos with a Sylvania camera and posed alongside the winners’ prizes. (Watch an episode here.)
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While on the show, she made the covers of such magazines as Life, Look and (with Collyer) TV Guide and even had a doll named for her. The blue-eyed Roxanne Dolls featured a Beat the Clock tag on her wrist and a tiny camera, and the game show assistant would often hand them out on the program.
In 1952, Roxanne had her first onscreen acting assignments on episodes of the CBS drama Casey, Crime Photographer, starring Richard Carlyle, and the syndicated anthology series Broadway Television Theatre.
In Billy Wilder’s The Seven Year Itch (1955), she played a woman named Elaine who rolls around on a beach with Tom Ewell’s Richard Sherman in a fantasy scene that parodies Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr’s in From Here to Eternity.
Born on March 20, 1929, Dolores Evelyn Rosedale attended Central High School and studied fashion design at the Minneapolis School of Fine Arts. She finished second in the Miss Minneapolis beauty pageant in 1947 and moved to New York, becoming a model with the Harry Conover agency and studying with Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio (her classmates there included Ben Gazzara).
Roxanne made her TV debut in 1948 on the CBS game show Winner Take All, also hosted by Collyer in what was the first game show produced by Goodson & Todman. When that was canceled after two seasons, she and Collyer went to work on Beat the Clock.
She left the show in August 1955 — and was replaced by Beverly Bentley — after marrying businessman Tom Roddy in 1954 and becoming pregnant with Ann, her first born.
She appeared on Broadway in 1956 in A Hatful of Rain and in the crime drama The Young Don’t Cry (1957), starring Sal Mineo and James Whitmore, then moved with her family back to Minnesota and worked for a furrier, modeled and appeared on lots of local commercials. She and her family later relocated to Palo Alto.
Roxanne and Roddy had four more children — Thomas, David, Michael and Elizabeth — before divorcing in 1979. She then married Stanley Shanedling, a lawyer and judge in Minneapolis.
In addition to her children, survivors include her grandchildren, Erica, Anna, Sarah and John; her great-grandchildren, Adeline, Tatiana, Elijah and Major; and her sister, Kitty.
