If you don’t know her name, you probably know her face.
Actress Marian Mercer seems so utterly familiar because she created a lengthy playbill of memorable characters during more than 40 years in theater, film and television.
She’s especially recognizable in Akron because this was her home.
Born in 1935, Mercer grew up in a two-story colonial house at 1351 Bellows St. in Firestone Park.
Her parents were Sam and Nelle Mercer, high school sweethearts in Moundsville, W.Va., who moved to Akron in 1916. Sam Mercer found a job at Firestone, where he remained for 47 years, retiring in 1963 as supervisor of the tire room at Plant 1. Marian’s siblings were Sam, Robert, Martha and Marjorie Mercer.
“I was very happy,” Mercer recalled of her childhood. “I loved to go to school and always got good grades.”
She attended Firestone Park Elementary and sang at Firestone Park Methodist Church, where she enjoyed her first showstopping moment. Marian was only 5 years old when she wandered out of the chorus in a children’s program and casually strolled out front to finish the song — much to the delight of the church audience.
Mercer studied voice with Burton Garlinghouse in Akron, and caught the theater bug at Garfield High School when drama coach Alexander Wilson persuaded her to try acting. She won the lead role of Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun, Garfield’s 1953 senior play.
A tall, slender, green-eyed blonde, Mercer enrolled at the University of Michigan to major in voice and minor in drama, expecting to teach music someday. The only C grade she received in college was in public speaking, a bit of an irony, given her future career.
“I think the most frightening thing for me was the jump from Akron to college,” she once told the Beacon Journal. “All of a sudden, there were lots of good people competing. It was a great leveler.”
Mercer immersed herself in theater, appearing in four Michigan stage productions during her freshman year. She later won a lead role in The Pirates of Penzance. Teaching was out. Theater was in.
“There’s something inside of me that has to come out,” Mercer admitted. “Even if I fail or have trouble getting work, I’ll just have to keep trying.”
After graduating in 1957, she returned to Ohio as a trouper for Musicarnival, the tent theater in Warrensville Heights, where she appeared in Guys and Dolls, Show Boat and other shows. A Beacon Journal critic praised her as “a comedienne with an unerring sense of timing” and labeled her as “the Carol Channing type.”
Mercer preferred subtle humor. She didn’t like making silly faces or pratfalls, and considered such antics to be undignified and unfeminine.
“I’m afraid even to mention I’m a comedienne because right away people expect me to do something kooky,” she said. “Gosh, how I hate that word.”
The Akron thespian moved to New York in the late 1950s, modeling clothes at Bergdorf-Goodman and working as a hostess at Schrafft’s restaurant while auditioning for roles.
She began receiving notice after succeeding Eileen Brennan in the off-Broadway hit Little Mary Sunshine, a spoof of operettas. She joined the ensemble in Greenwillow, a 1960 musical starring Anthony Perkins, and appeared in the flop New Faces of 1962, which closed in less than a month.
“Every job is a new challenge — even if I fail,” Mercer said. “I like to try new things.
Mercer told agents she was a character actress, but they kept sending her to auditions for sexy roles. That’s how she found herself playing a stripper for a Kenley Players’ production of Gypsy in Warren, Ohio.
“I won’t let my parents go and see me doing those bumps and grinds,” Mercer said. “I’ve had a whole series of sweet parts and it’s a shame I had to do this one so close to home.”
Mercer found work on TV variety programs such as The Andy Williams Show and The Dom DeLuise Show.
In 1964, she married actor Martin J. Cassidy, a castmate from Little Mary Sunshine. The couple settled into the Dakota apartment building at Central Park West. Despite her glamorous surroundings, Mercer remained firmly grounded.
She loved to clean house, calling it the greatest therapy in the world. When she got depressed, she scrubbed floors.
“I’m usually up at noon — I’ve been a sack hound ever since high school at Garfield,” she told the Beacon Journal. “Then I usually go out to audition for commercials.”
Mercer landed a career-making role in the 1968 Broadway show Promises, Promises, written by Neil Simon with music by Burt Bacharach. She portrayed bar floozy Marge MacDougall, a tipsy temptress in an owl coat, who doesn’t appear until the second act. Mercer joined leading man Jerry Orbach in the song A Fact Can Be a Beautiful Thing.
In April 1969, Mercer won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical. Orbach was named best actor.
“I’m glad this happened at 33 instead of 23,” Mercer told a reporter. “I know I won’t change now, but I don’t know if I could have handled it then.”
Her career became a whirlwind. She appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and landed her first movie, John and Mary, starring Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow.
She became a regular on The Dean Martin Show and The Sandy Duncan Show, appeared in several Broadway musicals, including a revival of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off with Sammie Davis Jr., landed parts in movies Oh, God! Book II and Nine to Five, and still found time to visit Akron.
After her first marriage ended in divorce, Mercer married Patrick Hogan, and the couple welcomed a daughter, Deidre.
In 1980, Mercer joined the cast of It’s a Living, a new ABC sitcom about waitresses working in a ritzy restaurant atop a Los Angeles skyscraper. Mercer played the role of stuffy hostess Nancy Beebe.
“I had turned down four other pilots before It’s a Living because I had gotten typed as a sort of young Eve Arden, like the saucy neighbor I played on Sandy Duncan’s series,” Mercer said. “But Nancy Beebe is a lot classier than some characters I’ve played and the first villain I’ve done on television.”
It’s a Living catapulted actresses Ann Jillian and Crystal Bernard to fame. It was briefly renamed Making a Living, then canceled by ABC after two seasons. It returned in 1985 with new syndicated episodes, and Mercer appeared in all 120 before the show ended in 1989.
She continued to find roles in such TV shows as The Golden Girls, Empty Nest, Touched by an Angel and Murder, She Wrote. Mercer’s final credit was in a 2000 episode of Providence, starring another Akron native, Melina Kanakaredes.
Without warning, Mercer disappeared from theater, film and television. Fans didn’t know she had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
She spent her final years in the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif., surrounded by residents who also had been in show business.
She was 75 when she passed away in 2011. Marian Mercer returned home to Akron, where she was buried in a family plot at Glendale Cemetery.
Mark J. Price is the author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.