Nanette Fabray, whose enthusiastic charm, wide smile and diverse talents made her a Tony Award-winning performer in the 1940s and an Emmy Award-winning comic actress in the 1950s, died on Thursday at her home in Palos Verdes, Calif. She was 97.
Her son, Dr. Jamie MacDougall, confirmed her death.
Ms. Fabray was 28 when she received the Tony for best actress in a musical for her performance in "Love Life," a collection of sketches with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Kurt Weill. It was her seventh Broadway show and followed her success in Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn's "High Button Shoes" the season before. Brooks Atkinson, writing about that musical in The New York Times, had called her "a neatly designed show-shop ingénue with considerable crackle."
In 1956 she won two Emmy Awards, as best comedienne (as the category was then known) and best actress in a supporting role, for her work on "Caesar's Hour," the follow-up to "Your Show of Shows," in which Sid Caesar had starred with Imogene Coca.
The next year, Ms. Fabray won another Emmy for the series, 10 months after she had been dismissed by the producers. Years later she said she had been fired because her agent made demands for her third-season contract that the producers considered unreasonable.
Ms. Fabray nearly gave her life for the show. In 1955, she was hospitalized for almost two weeks after being knocked unconscious by a falling pipe backstage during a broadcast.
The stage and the small screen turned out to be Ms. Fabray's métiers, but she started out in film. Her first movie role was as a lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I (Bette Davis) in "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" (1939). In that and the two other film dramas she made that year, she was billed as Nanette Fabares. She changed the spelling of her surname after too many public mispronunciations.
Ms. Fabray had one notable film success: the Comden and Green musical "The Band Wagon" (1953), directed by Vincente Minnelli. The film included the number "Triplets," in which she, Fred Astaire and Jack Buchanan played infants, with adult-size heads and torsos but short, stubby baby legs.