Ellen Hanley
Ellen Hanley (May 15, 1926 – February 12, 2007) was a musical theater performer best known for playing Fiorello H. LaGuardia's first wife in the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Fiorello!". She was related to the British writers James and Gerald Hanley, and the playwright, novelist, and scriptwriter William Hanley was her brother. Biography. Ellen Hanley was born in Lorain, Ohio, one of three children of William Gerald and Anne Rodgers Hanley. William Hanley, Sr. was born in Liverpool, England in 1899, of Irish Catholic immigrants. He was a seaman prior to settling in the US, and then worked as  a housepainter. In 1951, Hanley married Ronny Graham, a fellow actor. They adopted two children, Nora and Julian. The couple divorced in 1963. Ellen Hanley made her Broadway debut in "Annie Get Your Gun" in 1946 playing the part of Mary. The following year she appeared in "Barefoot Boy With Cheek" and won a Theater World award for her performance as Clothilde Pfefferkorn. in the late 1940s and 1950s she "toured extensively in summer-stock shows" and also during the 1950s performed in Julius Monk's revues. In 1952 she had a part in the musical revue "Two's Company , introducing the song Roundabout". In 1959 she took over the leading role in "First Impressions" from Polly Bergen, playing Elizabeth Bennett in a musical based on "Pride and Prejudice". She is best-known for playing Thea, Fiorello LaGuardia's first wife, in the Pulitzer Prize-winning in "Fiorello!", the Jerry Bock-Sheldon Harnick musical hit which ran for nearly 800 performances, from late 1959. She acted, in 1963, in a successful off-Broadway revival of "The Boys From Syracuse", a Richard Rodgers-Lorenz Hart musical based on Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors". Hanley died on February 12, 2007, aged  80, in Norwalk, Connecticut, of a stroke after a long battle with cancer.