LOS ANGELES — Frances Bay, the sweet, gentle
housewife who became a successful actress in middle age, appearing in
more than 50 motion pictures and 100 television shows including roles as
the “marble rye lady” on “Seinfeld” and the grandmother in Adam
Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore,” has died. She was 92.
Bay,
also popular as a stage actress in local theaters, died Thursday at
Providence Tarzana Medical Center in the San Fernando Valley, said her
cousin Marly Zaslov of Vancouver, British Columbia. Bay had been ill
with various infections.
The actress, whose right
leg was amputated below the knee after she was struck by a car in 2002,
had been active until recently, appearing regularly as Aunt Ginny in the
ABC sitcom “The Middle.”
Born in Mannville,
Alberta, on Jan. 23, 1919, the shy, diminutive Bay began acting in
Winnipeg, Manitoba — voicing princesses on radio shows — and then in
Toronto.
“I always wanted to be an actress,” she
told the Los Angeles Times in 1986 when she was appearing as the bitter,
eccentric mother in John Guare’s play “Bosoms and Neglect” in Los
Angeles.
“And it wasn’t ego,” she said. “I felt so
little about myself, considered myself such a sparrow. Not just my
size. I thought I was so plain. … I did plays not to show off but
because if I did that — I didn’t realize it at the time — I would be
somebody other than this person I didn’t really approve of. I guess
that’s true of a lot of actors.”
Yet when she
married her childhood sweetheart, businessman Charles Bay, the wannabe
actress shelved her aspirations and became a homemaker when his job took
them to the United States.
In the 1970s, when the
couple was living in Manhattan, she resumed her acting studies with
drama teacher Uta Hagen, and when the Bays moved to Boston, she began
acting in dinner theater, summer stock and radio.
With
renewed determination, in 1973 Bay sought — and got — agents and jobs
in New York, commenting later: “I don’t know if it was women’s lib or
something that kind of turned inside of me, but I just started doing it:
got new pictures, started pounding the pavement, went to agents — and I
got work.”
Two years later, when she and her
husband moved permanently to Los Angeles, Bay’s career began to
skyrocket. Beginning with the 1978 motion picture “Foul Play” starring
Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase, and moving into television a couple of
years later with appearances on “The Jeffersons,” “Dukes of Hazzard” and
indelibly as Fonzie’s Grandma Nussbaum in “Happy Days,” Bay was never
again in want of work.
Her characters were often
described simply as “old woman,” “elderly neighbor,” an aunt or a
grandmother (as in “Happy Gilmore” in 1996), even “Mrs. Santa Claus.” On
“Seinfeld,” she memorably played a woman who tangled with Jerry over
the last loaf of marble rye bread.
She was a
regular character actress for director David Lynch, who cast her in
“Blue Velvet,” “Wild at Heart,” “Twin Peaks” and “Fire Walk With Me.”
Live
theater gave Bay an opportunity to show her considerable acting
ability. Over the years, she was in such plays as “Number Our Days,”
“The Man Who Came to Dinner,” “Sarcophagus,” “The Pleasure of His
Company,” “Grease” and “Finnegan’s Wake.”
When she
appeared as the cancer-ridden mother Henny in “Bosoms and Neglect,” she
said it was a stretch for her, but one she enjoyed. To talk tough, she
said, she simply thought of driving and being cut off in traffic, noting
in that situation, “I can swear like a fishwife.”
Bay’s husband died in 2002, and their son died when he was 23. She has no immediate survivors.
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©2011 the Los Angeles Times
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