With her short white-blond hair, gregarious laugh, and hulky frame, Pat Carroll has been delighting audiences for more than 50 years. But, truth be told, her TV work has merely been a means of financing a lifestyle that allowed her to pursue a regular career as a theater performer and director. She is perhaps best remembered as Bunny Halper, wife of nightclub owner Sid Melton, on "The Danny Thomas Show" (CBS, 1961-1964) and as the inveterate matchmaker to Doris Day in the feature "With Six You Get Eggroll" (1968). Younger audiences might recognized Carroll for her stage turn in "Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein", which she played on Broadway and at colleges around the USA, or, more likely, as the voice of the villainous Ursula in Disney's "The Little Mermaid" (1989).
Born in Louisiana and raised in Los Angeles, Carroll made her professional stage debut in 1947 alongside Gloria Swanson in "A Goose for the Gander". Heading East, she hit the nightclub circuit, debuting in the revue at Le Ruban Bleu in 1950. By the time she made her Broadway debut in "Catch a Star" in 1955, she was a recognized TV performer; Carroll was a sketch performer on "The Red Buttons Show" (CBS, 1952-1953), and "Saturday Night Revue" (NBC, 1954). "Caesar's Hour" (NBC, 1956-1957), on which she is best recalled for playing Carl Reiner's wife in ongoing sketches, earned her a Supporting Actress Emmy Award. For much of the decade, Carroll also appeared on many of the proliferating quiz and panel shows, including "Masquerade Party" (CBS, 1958) and "Keep Talking" (CBS, 1958-1959). Among her later small screen credits were turns as a motherly landlady to Bobby Sherman in the short-lived "Getting Together" (ABC, 1971-72), the overprotective mother of Adam Arkin in "Busting Loose" (CBS, 1977), a newspaper publisher and foil for the star in the syndicated "The Ted Knight Show" (1986) and Suzanne Somers' mother on the syndicated sitcom "She's the Sheriff" (1987). As a guest performer, she was particularly memorable on a 1971 episode of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" (CBS) playing an unpleasant woman with whom Mary Richards shares a hospital room and a generation recalled her as the Wicked Stepmother to Lesley Ann Warren's "Cinderella" (CBS, 1966). More recently, Carroll was utterly charming as a talkative ticket seller at an old movie palace with dreams of dancing on stage one more time in the American Movie Classics original drama "The Royale" (1997).
For much of the 80s and 90s, Carroll has been performing onstage, notably at Washington, DC's The Shakespeare Theatre. After a well-received turn as the Nurse in "Romeo and Juliet" the veteran actress made theatrical history playing Sir John Falstaff in "The Merry Wives of Windsor" in 1990. Carroll tackled Brecht's "Mother Courage" in 1993 and then donned trousers again for a go at the title role of Ben Jonson's "Volpone" in 1996.