Vivienne Sonia Segal (1897-1992) was a hugely successful theatrical star in musical comedies and operettas who never succeeded in a Hollywood career (perhaps because she did not really want one).
Segal made her first appearance on Broadway in 1915, when she was eighteen, and her final one in 1952, in a revival of Pal Joey. She had been in the original production in 1940, and debuted the song ‘Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered’.
Segal’s Broadway career was wide-ranging. She starred with W C Fields in the Ziegfeld Follies in 1924 and 1925, and was also in The Desert Song in 1926.
In Hollywood, Segal starred in four pictures at Warner Bros in the 1930 musical frenzy, and that was pretty much it. Apart from a supporting role in MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle and a couple of shorts, she restricted herself to the stage (apart from a handful of television appearances) until retiring in 1966.
