Broadway legend Mimi Hines has died.
On Tuesday, lawyer Mark Sendroff announced that the Canadian actress had passed away the previous day of natural causes at her home in Las Vegas, Nevada. She was 91.
A celebration of her life and career will be held to coincide with the upcoming unveiling of Hines and her ex-husband Phil Ford’s star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in downtown Palm Springs, California.
Born in Vancouver, Hines started performing at an early age, but her career really took off after she started collaborating with her comedian husband Ford in the 1950s.
They appeared together on The Tonight Show in 1958, where she performed the show tune Till There Was You.
However, Hines was perhaps best known for succeeding Barbra Streisand on the Broadway hit Funny Girl for an 18-month-long run starting in December 1965.
“It’s always easier to follow a good actress than a bad one,” she told The New York Times at the time. “Miss Streisand is wonderful. (And) there is such a veil of success about Funny Girl that I feel protectively wrapped by it.”
She later starred in many productions, including Anything Goes, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Sugar, and released three studio albums over the course of the 1960s.
The actress also appeared as Mrs. Latimer in the sitcom Frasier in 1999 and returned to Broadway in 1994 to play Miss Lynch in Grease.
Hines and Ford divorced in 1972, though the pair worked together professionally several times after the split. He died in 2005 at the age of 85.
