Sondra Lee, an actress, dancer and singer who brought an impish glee to supporting roles in the original Broadway musical productions of “Peter Pan” and “Hello, Dolly!,” died on Monday at her home in Manhattan. She was 97.
A longtime friend, the Rev. Joshua Ellis, confirmed the death.
With her frenetic energy and 4-foot-10 frame, Ms. Lee seemed destined to play a certain kind of musical theater character: excitable, endearing and charmingly scheming.
She began dancing on Broadway under the tutelage of Jerome Robbins, the influential choreographer and director, when she was about 18, and came to public attention seven years later, when he cast her as the Native American princess Tiger Lily in his 1954 musical version of “Peter Pan.”
Opposite the equally gamine Mary Martin, who played Peter, Ms. Lee became a critical favorite. Reviewing the show for The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson called her performance “uproarious,” in part because Ms. Lee gave Tiger Lily a smart-talking city accent.
“Peter Pan,” which ran for 152 performances and earned its star a Tony Award, was the first Broadway show to be filmed in color for television, and when it was broadcast on NBC in 1955 it brought Ms. Lee into millions of American households. The morning after the broadcast, she was waiting for a train when she suddenly realized that her life had changed.
“A whole bunch of people came up to me on the platform and said, ‘We saw you last night! We saw you last night!,’” she told The New York Post in 2014. “Honestly, we had no idea how many people would be watching.”
In 1964, Ms. Lee was cast as the shopkeeper’s assistant Minnie Fay in “Hello, Dolly!,” directed and choreographed by Gower Champion. It was another second-tier role, but her effusive energy once again helped her stand out. She remained in the Broadway cast for about three years, as the show’s title role, the matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi, passed from Carol Channing to Betty Grable, Ginger Rogers and Martha Raye.
Of the many Dollys, Ms. Lee said that Ms. Raye was her favorite, and the two took the musical on a U.S.O. tour in 1967, during the Vietnam War.
Offstage, Ms. Lee spent decades as an acting teacher, primarily at New York University and Stella Adler’s conservatory. She said she had a romantic relationship with an early student of Ms. Adler’s, Marlon Brando.
In 1965, Ms. Lee was seconded from Ms. Adler’s studio to the Metropolitan Opera, where she taught acting techniques to the corps of singers, including how to perform a convincing death onstage.
“It’s a shame when a beautifully sung part is ruined by an inadequate death scene that evokes titters and often loud laughter from the audience,” she told The Times in 1965.
“The body dies in sections, hands, body and legs,” she added. “Don’t go down like an elephant.”
Ms. Lee spent almost her entire life on or near the New York theater scene, having been born Sondra Lee Gash in Newark on Sept. 30, 1928. Her father, David, worked for a company that distributed syrup and carbonated water, and her mother, Belle (Rosenfeld) Gash, was a homemaker.
When she was 10, an aunt took her to see the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, a successor company to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Backstage, she met the prima ballerina Alexandra Danilova, who was reputedly so taken with the precocious child that she arranged for her to study at Olga Tarassova’s Russian ballet school in New York City.
In her teens, she performed in the revue circuit around the Catskill resorts before returning to New York in 1947 to try out on Broadway. After being turned down for one musical because she was too small, she walked past a theater holding auditions for “High Button Shoes,” choreographed by Mr. Robbins.
“I entered the stage door and asked, ‘Who’s Robbins?’” she recalled in her memoir, “I’ve Slept With Everybody” (2009). “Out of nowhere this guy comes forward, ‘I’m Robbins. Who are you?’”
Informed that the auditions were over, she told Mr. Robbins jokingly that she was “going home to commit suicide.”
He replied, “Don’t go home and commit suicide. Come over here and dance for me.”
Her audition for the “Bathing Beauties” dance sequence included pretending to dip a toe in frigid water and then doing a double take. The other actors burst out laughing, and Mr. Robbins added her to the dancing corps. His biographer Amanda Valli described his admiration for Ms. Lee’s “expressive little body” and “enormous eyes,” noting that she had “an appealing waiflike quality that made her perfect clay for a dramatic choreographer like Jerry.”
After “Peter Pan,” Mr. Robbins included her in several other productions, as well as Ballets: U.S.A., a company that toured widely in the late 1950s. She was dancing at Gian Carlo Menotti’s Festival of the Two Worlds, a summer music festival in Spoleto, Italy, when the filmmaker Federico Fellini saw her and caster her as a ballerina in a party scene in the 1960 film “La Dolce Vita.”
Following her dancing career, Ms. Lee directed stage productions, including “Hillbilly Women” at the ArcLight Theater in Manhattan in 2011.
Ms. Lee’s 1953 marriage to the actor Sidney Armus ended in divorce. She has no immediate survivors.
In June, Ms. Lee attended a performance of songs from “Hello, Dolly!” by the Transport Group Theater Company at Carnegie Hall.
During the show, she came onstage to be recognized as the last surviving principal from the show’s original cast. The audience stood and roared.
Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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