Monica Lewis

Monica Lewis (born May Lewis; May 5, 1922 – June 12, 2015) was an American jazz singer and film actress.

Biography

Lewis was born in Chicago, Illinois on May 5, 1922, the youngest of three children. Her father, Leon, was a pianist and composer and her mother, Jessica, was a singer with the Chicago Opera Company.

At the age of seventeen, she started working as a singer for a radio show calledGloom Dodgers.

With the help of Benny Goodman she began to establish her career through nationally broadcast shows such as The Revere Camera Show and Beat the Band. Lewis was dubbed "America’s Singing Sweetheart" during this time. Some of her songs included "Put the Blame on Mame", "I Wish You Love", and "Autumn Leaves."

In 1947 Lewis started providing the singing voice for "Miss Chiquita Banana," a cartoon television commercial character. In 1948 she appeared in the first ever Ed Sullivan Show. In 1950 she was signed a contract with MGM. Some of her films included The Strip, Everything I Have Is Yours, and Affair with a Stranger, and she later appeared in some 1970s disaster filmssuch as Earthquake (1974), Rollercoaster (1977), and both Airport '77 (1977) and The Concorde ... Airport '79 (1979).

Lewis was married twice. Her first husband was the American record producer Bob Thiele. They married in 1945 but divorced a couple of years later. She moved to Beverly Hills, California in the 1950s. In 1956, she married film producer Jennings Lang and they remained together until his death in 1996. They had three children. Her sister Barbara was a pianist and her brother Marlo worked as a television producer. She died on June 12, 2015 at her home in Woodland Hills, California of natural causes at the age of 93.

Filmography

• Inside Straight (1951) as Cafe singer
• The Strip (1951) as Herself
• Excuse My Dust (1951) as Daisy Lou Shultzer
• Everything I Have Is Yours (1952) as Sybil Meriden
• Affair with a Stranger (1953) as Janet Boothe
• The D.I. (1957) as Burt
• Charley Varrick (1973) as Beverly
• Earthquake (1974) as Barbara
• Airport '77 (1977) as Anne
• Rollercoaster (1977) as Tourist mother
• Zero to Sixty (1978) as Aunt Clara
• The Concorde ... Airport '79 (1979) as Gretchen
• The Sting II (1983) as Band singer
• Stick (1985) as Female vocalist
• Dead Heat (1988) as Mrs. Von Heisenberg