Frances Bergen, a former model and occasional actress and singer whose show business career took a back seat to her longtime role as the wife of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the mother of their actress daughter, Candice, has died. She was 84.
Ms. Bergen died Monday in Los Angeles after a prolonged illness, said family spokesman Heidi Schaeffer.
Once described by former Los Angeles Times film reviewer Kevin Thomas as “one of Hollywood’s enduring, elegant beauties,” Ms. Bergen was 19-year-old Frances Westerman when she attended Edgar Bergen’s popular radio show as the guest of a staff member.
After spotting the Birmingham, Ala., native’s long legs in the front row, the 39-year-old ventriloquist reportedly asked to meet her; a little more than a year later, in 1945, they were married.
By then, she was a successful model in New York and was seen in magazines and on billboards as “the Chesterfield Girl” and “the Ipana Girl.”
In the 1950s, Ms. Bergen appeared in several films, including “Titanic” (1953), and had guest roles on “Four Star Playhouse,” “Fireside Theatre,” and “The Dick Powell Show.”
At one point, Ms. Bergen aspired to a career as a chanteuse and had several engagements in major supper clubs. But in a 1990 interview with the Times, she recalled reluctantly turning down a six-week singing engagement at a London club.
“I had to go ask my husband,” she said. “And his reaction to my great enthusiasm was, `You mean you would leave me and the baby?’
“Candy, `the baby,’ was 10 at the time. He carried on so about it that I didn’t take the job,” she said. “But I was raised by a Southern lady in a mid-Victorian manner, and that’s the way it was in those days. I didn’t talk back to my husband. I was taught that you do have to compromise and not assert yourself as much as you might want.”
Career ambitions aside, she devoted most of her time to what a 1990 Times story referred to as “playing the pretty foil” for her husband and his famously smart-aleck dummy Charlie McCarthy.
Edgar Bergen died in 1978 at age 75.
In the 1980s, Ms. Bergen had small roles in films such as “American Gigolo,” “Rich and Famous” and “The Sting II” and appeared in “MacGyver” and “Murder, She Wrote.”
She played the matriarch in writer-director Henry Jaglom’s 1990 dramatic film “Eating,” turning in what the Times’ Thomas called “surely the best part of her career”; she later appeared on her daughter’s series “Murphy Brown.”
In addition to her daughter, she is survived by her son, Kris.
