June Havoc Dies at the Age of 97

Actress and former child vaudeville star June Havoc has died at the age of 97. She passed Sunday of natural causes at her home in Stamford, Connecticut, according to Tana Sibilio, the star's caregiver.

Havoc’s early life with her sister – future burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee – and their stage mother was portrayed in the hit Broadway musical Gypsy. The ‘musical fable’ opened in Broadway in 1959, starring Ethel Merman as the ambitious stage mother, Mama Rose.

The actress always complained that the musical distorted her own story and portrayed her mother in the wrong way. Havoc told her side in two memoirs of her own, Early Havoc and More Havoc, as well as the one-woman show, An Unexpected Evening With June Havoc.

“I cherish and am extremely proud of my childhood,” she told www.newsday.com in 1995. “If you’d been a child – a phenomenon, really – someone who earned fifteen-hundred dollars a week on the Keith-Orpheum circuit, who was a headliner with all the applause and laughter and raised in that glorious vaudeville family, and then see yourself portrayed as a no-talent, whining nothing, well, it hurts terribly.”

According to www.latimes.com, when Havoc was just two-years old, she went on stage, where she was dubbed as the “Tiniest Toe Dancer in the World.” By the age of seven, she was a vaudeville star performing on the same stages as Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker.

“I loved being her,” Havoc told the www.nytimes.com in 1992. “I loved vaudeville.”

Havoc went on to play showgirl Gladys Bumps in the hit musical comedy Pal Joey and starred in TV's The June Havoc Show.