Allyn Ann McLerie

Allyn Ann McLerie (December 1, 1926 – May 21, 2018) was a Canadian-born American actress, singer and dancer who worked with many of Golden Age musical theatre's major choreographers, including George Balanchine, Agnes de Mille, and Jerome Robbins. Life and career McLerie was born in Grand-Mère, Quebec, Canada, the only child of Vera Alma MacTaggart (née Stewart) and Allan Gordon McLerie, an aviator and WWI veteran. Allan Gordon McLerie died of a heart attack four months before his daughter's birth, and Allyn Ann McLerie moved with her widowed mother to the United States at age one. (McLerie's mother, Vera, died on her daughter's 54th birthday in 1980 at age 83.) Allyn studied dancing at a studio in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and made her Broadway debut as a teenager in Kurt Weill's One Touch of Venus. She went on to replace Sono Osato as Ivy in On the Town, then played Amy Spettigue in the 1948 Broadway production of Where's Charley? (Theatre World Award). A life member of The Actors Studio, McLerie's other Broadway credits include Miss Liberty, the drama Time Limit, Redhead (understudying Gwen Verdon), and West Side Story.