Mary Kay Stearns
American actress (1925-2018)
Mary Katherine Stearns (née Jones; October 27, 1925 – November 17, 2018) was an American actress best known for portraying the fictional version of herself on the sitcom Mary Kay and Johnny from 1947 until 1950.
Career
Stearns's career began at the age of 2 and a half as an actress and singer at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California. She also appeared in several films before going to Broadway. She had a supporting role in the hit comedy Strange Bedfellows, which ran on Broadway from January through July 1948, for 229 performances.
In 1947, Stearns, who looked young for her age, was offered a job as a fashion model for an early home shopping television program. On the advice of her newlywed husband Johnny, who thought the idea to be weak, she refused; Johnny suggested to the broadcaster that she instead host a domestic sitcom with him. On November 18, the DuMont Television Network debuted a new show starring the two entitled Mary Kay and Johnny. The series had the Stearnses playing fictional versions of themselves. On the show the pair portrayed a newlywed couple, also named Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns, who were trying to make it in New York. Most of the episodes took place in an apartment complex in Greenwich Village, New York.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mary Kay Stearns” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.