Ann B. Davis, Alice on ‘Brady Bunch,’ Dies at 88

From: Variety

Ann B. Davis, known for her role as the beloved housekeeper on “The Brady Bunch,” died Sunday in San Antonio, Texas. She was 88.

Davis fell and hit her head in the bathtub on Saturday, causing a subdural hematoma, and never regained consciousness.

Davis was a favorite of “The Brady Bunch” as Alice, the often comedic housekeeper that lived with the iconic TV family. The ABC show, created by Sherwood Schwartz, ran from 1969-74 and would go on to spawn several movies and a spinoff series.

The show followed the large Brady family, played by Robert Reed, Florence Henderson, Barry Williams, Maureen McCormick, Christopher Knight, Mike Lookinland, Eve Plumb and Susan Olsen.

“I made up a background story. I did have a twin sister, so I used that as a basis,” Davis said of the role in a 2004 interview with the Archive of America Television. “I cared very much about this family. It was my family. It was close to my family as Alice would ever get. I would have died for any single one of them at any point.”

Davis would go on to reprise her role in “The Brady Bunch Variety Hour,” spinoff “The Brady Brides” and movies “The Brady Girls Get Married” and “A Very Brady Christmas.” She appeared as a truck driver in 1995′s “The Brady Bunch Movie.”

Before “Brandy Bunch,” Davis rose to fame in 1955 with “The Bob Cummings Show” as secretary Charmaine “Shultzy” Schultz. The role earned her four Emmy nominations and two wins, one in 1958 and one in 1959. The show ended in 1959 after five seasons. Davis received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960.

“I remember my first ‘demographic report’ on the ‘Brady Bunch,’” Davis recalled in the Archive of American Television interview. “I was with a friend, who told her little girl, ‘Honey, you remember Shultzy?’ The girl said, ‘That’s not Shultzy, that’s Alice!’ I knew that we were coming along.”

She also had a role as physical education teacher Miss Wilson in 1965-66 series “The John Forsythe Show.” Most recently, she had a guest role in 1997 on the sitcom “Something So Right.”

Born in Schenectady, N.Y., Davis had originally planned to study medicine at the University of Oklahoma, but her plans changed when she found a passion for acting, thanks to a production of “Oklahoma!” in which her brother was a dancer.

The actress was also an author, releasing a collection of 280 recipes in a book titled “Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook” in 1994.

Her most recent reunion with her former “Brady” co-stars was in 2007 at the TV Land Awards.

Christopher Knight, who played one of the young Bradys, issued the following statement about his former co-star: “It is with sadness that I hear of the passing of Ann B. Davis. At the same time, it is with fondness that she will be remembered. As with perhaps all of America, I smile when I think of Alice. Ann B. Davis was used by all of us Bradys (adults and kids) as the benchmark of professionalism and we are all better for having shared time working together. I will always remember Ann B as a much more complex and serious person than what her comedic roles would project. She was kind and caring but above all, she was an intensely private and contemplative person who balanced her self-respect with the respect she showed all those whom she came in contact with. She will both be missed and loved forever.”

SAG-AFTRA president Ken Howard issued the following statement about Davis: “Ann was a comic wonder, and her iconic character on ‘The Brady Bunch’ continues to live on for generations to enjoy. We are grateful to Ann for the five years she selflessly served her fellow members as an elected member of the board of this union.”

12 Things You Didn't Know About the ‘Brady Bunch’ Star

The show only lasted five seasons in its original run, yet “The Brady Bunch’s” endless life in syndication was enough to make Ann B. Davis a TV icon.

But Davis, who died Sunday at age 88, was active in TV, film and stage for more than 15 years before she donned the blue uniform to become housekeeper Alice Nelson on the enduring ABC sitcom. When “Brady Bunch” began, Davis received equal billing with stars Florence Henderson and Robert Reed, who were lesser known to TV at the time.

Davis, after all, had earned two supporting comedy actress Emmys for her role as “Shultzy” in the 1960s rom-com “The Bob Cummings Show” (aka “Love That Bob”). She played the devoted assistant with a deep crush on her boss, a professional photographer and ladies’ man.

Here are a few things most “Brady Bunch” fans probably don’t know about Davis’ career, gleaned from the pages of Variety.

Always a cut up: Davis hosted the ninth annual American Cinema Editors awards fete at the Beverly Hills Hotel in 1959.

In 1960 she made her Broadway debut, replacing Carol Burnett as the star of “Once Upon a Mattress.”

Davis was elected to the Screen Actors Guild board of governors in 1958. She was active on the board during the lengthy 1960 actors’ strike.

After she won her second consecutive Emmy in 1959, Davis’ twin sister Harriet wired her the message: “One of us was bound to have twins.”

In 1963, she starred in a pilot, “Get With It,” that was a spinoff of the NBC military-school comedy “McKeever & the Colonel.” The “wacky WACS” project, as Variety dubbed it, didn’t get picked up but it did send Davis to the hospital during filming for a strained arch due to “prolonged marching scenes,” as she told Army Archerd.

Davis was part of the comedy troupe on 1963’s “The Keefe Brasselle Show,” a summer replacement series on CBS that featured a young Barbra Streisand on its premiere episode.

She did an awful lot of regional theater, night club dates and summer stock in the 1960s. Milwaukee; Palm Beach; Indianapolis; Chicago; Porterville, Calif.; San Diego; Traverse City, Mich.; Harrison, Maine; Erie, Pa. — Davis was all over the map.

She opened a stint in “Arsenic and Old Lace” at Santa Barbara’s Lobero Theater on the same day her father died in 1964.

She co-starred with John Forsythe, later of “Dynasty” fame, and Elsa Lanchester, aka “Bride of Frankenstein,” in the short-lived 1965-66 NBC comedy “The John Forsythe Show,” about an Air Force major who inherits a girls’ school.

In 1969 she co-starred with Louis Gossett Jr., William Windom and Bill Bixby in a “Hollywood Television Theater” one-shot production of the Hugh Wheeler play “Big Fish, Little Fish” for L.A. pubcaster KCET.

Davis was very active in the USO and served on showbiz’s USO Council in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1967, she spent the Christmas holiday period touring Vietnam, and led a 35-day trip to South Korea the following year. In 1970, a USO auditions session in Hollywood that Davis was overseeing was disrupted by a bomb threat allegedly from the Students for a Democratic Society org. “It’s too bad SDS doesn't recognize that the USO is not a military organization,” she told Variety.

“The Brady Bunch” was originally titled “The Brady Brood.” The first report of Davis joining the cast ran in the Oct. 3, 1968, edition of Daily Variety, which misspelled Robert Reed’s surname as “Reid.”

And one bonus item:

 In the spring of 1969, a few months before “Brady Bunch” premiered, Davis co-starred in the edgy satire “The Chronicles of Hell,” by avant-garde playwright Michel de Ghelderode, for L.A. Repertory Theater.