Sometimes it makes the most sense to tell a story backwards. I first took notice of character actress Kate Murtagh (1920-2017) in a hilarious turn as a prison matron in the 1975 exploitation classic Switchblade Sisters, a role that seems to evoke Hope Emerson's in Caged (1950). Imagine my delight when I discovered that Murtagh's career dated back to vaudeville!
Murtagh was a big gal, standing 6' 1". Her career as a bit player in film and television began in earnest around 1960. She's actually in some major (or well known) films like Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), Pocketful of Miracles (1961), Another Nice Mess (1972), The Night Strangler (1973), The Long Goodbye (1973), Farewell My Lovely (1975), The Car (1977), and Dr. Detroit (1983). Most of her credits are on tv shows like The Twilight Zone, The Munsters, I Dream of Jeannie, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, Three's Company, and Mad About You. You may also recognize her as the model on the cover of Supertramp's 1979 album Breakfast in America:
Prior to this, Kate was in a comedy singing trio with her sisters Jean and Onriette, called The Murtagh Sisters, though rendered sometimes as The Murtah Sisters. The act was together from around 1934 through 1946, coached and managed by their musical parents. Their father Henry B. Murtagh was a composer, conductor and theatre organist (which in the silent movie days could be a major gig at some of the bigger venues). He also write music for Oregon's state song. Their mother Wootson Davis Murtagh was a trained singer.
Initially intended to be a straight vocal act modeled on The Pickens Sisters, they eventually incorporated comedy (incidentally, this is also how the Marx Brothers evolved). The Murtah Sisters performed very late vaudeville venues and presentation houses (Loew's State, RKO Orpheum, the Capitol Theatre), were on radio, performed in legit theatre (a campy revival of The Drunkard, the original national tour of Hellzapoppin (1940-41) and in Broadway shows like Take a Bow (1944), with Chico Marx, Pat Rooney, Gene Sheldon, Jay C. Flippen, and Think -a-Drink Hoffman. They were even in movies, including Freshman Year (1938) with Dixie Dunbar, a short called Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry (1942), and several Soundies. When they were older, they also performed in major night clubs in New York, L.A. and Chicago.
When the sister act broke up, for a time Kate went solo with an act not unlike the one she had done with her sisters. She appeared in the Broadway show Texas, Li'l Darling (1949) with Kenny Delmar and a young Edward Platt (The Chief on Get Smart), and was on TV variety programs like Cavalcade of Stars and The Billy Rose Show. In 1955, she launched her own nationally syndicated one panel comic strip called Annie and Fannie:
This is not to be confused with Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder's Little Annie Fanny feature which ran in Playboy from 1962 to 1988. (A natural mistake given that among Murtagh's screen credit is an episode of Hugh Hefner's Playboy After Dark).
Murtagh's final screen credit was a 1999 episode of the TV show Snoops with Gina Gershon.
For more on show business history, especially vaudeville where the Murtagh Sisters performed, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous,
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