Kathryn Grant. Wikipedia.
Born Olive Kathryn Grandstaff in West Columbia, Texas, she graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1955. Two years later she became Bing Crosby‘s second wife, being more than thirty years his junior. The couple had three children, Harry, Mary Frances, and Nathaniel.[2] She appeared as a guest star on her husband’s 1964–1965 ABC sitcom The Bing Crosby Show.
Crosby largely retired from acting after her marriage, but did have featured roles as Princess Parisa in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), and in the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959). She also played the part of “Mama Bear” alongside her husband and children in Goldilocks and co-starred with Jack Lemmon in the comedy Operation Mad Ball (1957), with Tony Curtis in the drama Mister Cory (1957) and as a trapeze artist in The Big Circus (1959). In the mid-1970s, she hosted The Kathryn Crosby Show, a 30-minute local talk-show on KPIX-TV in San Francisco. Husband Bing appeared as a guest occasionally. Since Bing Crosby’s death in 1977, she has taken on a few smaller roles and the lead in the short-lived 1996 Broadway musical State Fair.
In the 1960s, Crosby studied for and received her nursing degree at the Queen of Angels Hospital in Los Angeles.
For 16 years ending in 2001, Crosby hosted the Crosby National Golf Tournament at Bermuda Run Country Club in Bermuda Run, North Carolina. A nearby bridge carrying U.S. Route 158 over the Yadkin River is named for Kathryn Crosby.
On November 4, 2010, Crosby was seriously injured in an automobile accident in the Sierra Nevada that killed her 85-year-old second husband, Maurice William Sullivan, whom she had married in 2000.
New york times obituary in 2024_
Kathryn Crosby, a Texas-born beauty queen and aspiring actress who put aside her movie career when she married Bing Crosby, the movie star and honey-voiced baritone, died on Friday at her home in Hillsborough, Calif. She was 90.
Harlan Boll, a publicist speaking for her family, announced her death.
The couple met cute on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles in 1953. Kathryn Grant, as she was then known, was a new contract player rushing to deliver a load of petticoats to the wardrobe department while on her way to a tennis game. Mr. Crosby, the laconic, blue-eyed heart throb, was already an American institution.
“What’s your rush, Tex?” Mr. Crosby asked, standing in the door of his dressing room. She stopped short, and down went the petticoats and her tennis racket.
They kept colliding, though less dramatically, in the days that followed — Ms. Crosby even tried out for a part in one of Mr. Crosby’s big hits, “White Christmas.” When she asked to interview the star for her column, “Texas Girl in Hollywood,” which was running in several Texas newspapers, he finagled the appointment into a dinner date at Chasen’s, the Hollywood canteen. On the drive home, he took her hand and sang “You’d Be So Easy to Love.” She was 19; he was 49.
Their courtship was far from easy, though Mr. Crosby proposed that year. The star, beloved for his public image as a laid-back Everyman, was diffident and mercurial. He disappeared for months at a time, set wedding dates and broke them — once because, as he joked, he’d left his toupee at home, and once because another romantic entanglement had threatened suicide. He was also involved with Grace Kelly, his co-star in “The Country Girl” and “High Society.” He and Kathryn finally married in a Las Vegas church in 1957
Ms. Crosby had worked steadily since her arrival in Hollywood, with a slew of uncredited roles as well as bit parts in movies like “Rear Window” (1954) and “My Sister Eileen” (1955). She worked mostly for Columbia Pictures, which signed her after she was dropped by Paramount.
She had a starring role as a princess in “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,” a 1958 fantasy adventure film, and appeared in the courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), starring James Stewart and George C. Scott. (Bosley Crowther, in his review for The New York Times, deemed Ms. Crosby excellent in her supporting role.)
But after her marriage and the birth of her three children, Harry, Mary Frances and Nathaniel, her husband urged her to turn away from acting. She worked occasionally as a model for the designer Jean Louis and performed in several summer stock productions, activities that irritated her husband, who had old-fashioned ideas about marriage.
Mr. Crosby was constantly on the move — if he wasn’t on a film set, he was playing golf, hunting or fishing, often in exotic locales, and he expected his young wife to run a tight household back home in Hillsborough, south of San Francisco.
She was often scolded, as she wrote in her 1983 memoir, “My Life With Bing,” for being a lax housekeeper and disciplinarian. He scolded her, too, for her pursuit of a nursing degree, which she earned in 1963 — she earned a teaching certificate, too — studies that in Mr. Crosby’s view encouraged more “neglect” of her family duties
Once, while Mr. Crosby was on an extended solo vacation in Biarritz, France, he proposed that she leave their children with him and a young French stewardess, one of a few “nannies” he tried to foist on Ms. Crosby, who gamely prevailed. (Her technique with the French interloper was simply to leave the children with the young woman for the day, after which she promptly quit.)
Ms. Crosby was never cowed by her domineering husband, whom she said she adored. She appeared in the Crosby family Christmas specials, an annual television staple, and in Minute Maid orange juice commercials, another family affair. (The last Christmas special, in 1977, aired after Mr. Crosby’s death and was introduced by Ms. Crosby; it featured an exquisite duet between Mr. Crosby and David Bowie, in which they wove “Peace on Earth” with “The Little Drummer Boy,” now a Christmas classic.)
“For our whole 20 years of married life Bing alternately implored and enjoined me to get organized,” Ms. Crosby wrote with typical brio. “It was very much like ordering a government to reduce inflation.”
Olive Kathryn Grandstaff was born on Nov. 25, 1933, in Houston and grew up in West Columbia, Texas, an hour away. Her father, Delbert Grandstaff, a former Marine, was a high school football coach; her mother, Olive (Stokely) Grandstaff, was an elementary schoolteacher
Kathryn was 3 when she entered her first beauty pageant, where she was crowned “Splash Day Princess.”
Later, as rodeo queen of a Houston stock show and exposition, she impressed a talent scout in the audience, who suggested that she might have a future in Hollywood, especially if she lost her Texas accent. She studied drama at the University of Texas at Austin and moved to Los Angeles a year shy of her degree, which she earned a few years later by attending summer school.
Mr. Crosby was named “Hollywood’s Most Typical Father” in 1937. But his home life with his first wife, Dixie Lee, whom he married in 1930, was troubled.
He was an absent father and, when home, a cold and frightening disciplinarian. Dixie Lee, an alcoholic, died of ovarian cancer in 1952, when she was 42. Their four sons all suffered from alcoholism, and two, Lindsay and Dennis, died by suicide, in 1989 and 1991. Gary, Mr. Crosby’s oldest son, wrote of his chaotic upbringing in his memoir, “Going My Own Way” (1983
Ms. Crosby’s memoir, which painted a warmer family life, came out the same year. At the time, Gary Crosby was quoted as saying that his father seemed to be raising his second family more carefully.
Mr. Crosby died of a heart attack in October 1977 after completing a round of golf at a course outside Madrid. He was 74 and had appeared in 58 movies during his half-century career. “I can’t think of any better way for a golfer who sings for a living to finish the round,” Ms. Crosby told reporters.
Ms. Crosby is survived by her three children — Harry, a former actor turned investment banker; Mary, an actress best known for her role on “Dallas,” the 1980s nighttime soap, as Kristin Shepard, the character who shot J.R. Ewing, the show’s amoral oil baron; and Nathaniel, a golfer who played on the amateur circuit and hosted his father’s charitable tournament, the Bing Crosby National Pro-Am — and many grandchildren.
Ms. Crosby married Maurice William Sullivan, an educator who had tutored her children and who later became a trustee of the Crosby estate, in 2000. Mr. Sullivan died in 2010, when the couple’s car veered off a highway and struck a boulder. Ms. Crosby was seriously injured in the accident.
At Mr. Crosby’s death, Ms. Crosby told The Associated Press that she had been rereading his love letters, which revealed, she said, that he was “a pretty cute kid when it came to convincing a girl that what she really wanted to do was stay at home and scrub floors.”
“He didn’t know that he was a male chauvinist pig — but he was, of course,” she said.
“I expected Bing to live to be at least 92,” Ms. Crosby added, “and I never felt that Bing was much older than 14
