Broadway Performer Ellen Hanley Dies At 80

Ellen Hanley — a musical-theater performer best-known for playing Fiorello LaGuardia's first wife in the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fiorello!" — has died of a stroke after a long battle with cancer. She was 80.

Hanley died Monday at Norwalk (Conn.) Hospital, her daughter, Nora Graham, said.

The actress, born in Lorain, Ohio, made her Broadway debut in "Annie Get Your Gun," starring Ethel Merman in 1946. The following year she appeared as Clothilde Pfefferkorn in "Barefoot Boy With Cheek," a zany collegiate musical featuring Nancy Walker and Red Buttons and written by Max Shulman.

In the 1952 revue, "Two's Company," which starred Bette Davis, Hanley introduced the Vernon Duke-Ogden Nash song "Roundabout."

Hanley also was in the cast of the 1959 musical, "First Impressions," based on Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice." During the show's run, she replaced leading lady Polly Bergen as Austen's spirited heroine, Elizabeth Bennett. That same year, she appeared in "Fiorello!" — the hit Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick musical about the well-known mayor of New York, which ran for nearly 800 performances.

In 1963, Hanley starred in a successful off-Broadway revival of "The Boys From Syracuse," a Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical based on Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors."

During the late 1940s and into the 1950s, Hanley toured extensively in summer-stock shows. She also was a regular performer in Julius Monk's celebrated topical revues in the 1950s at such places as Upstairs at the Downstairs.

In 1951, Hanley married Ronnie Graham, a performer and writer for the revue "New Faces of 1952" and who later wrote for such television shows as "M*A*S*H." They were divorced in 1963.

Besides her daughter, Hanley is survived by her son, Julian, of Bridgewater, Conn.; her sister, Patricia Hanley, of New York; her brother, playwright William Hanley of Ridgefield, Conn.; and several grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held in March.