Kathryn Crosby, the actress and widow of Bing Crosby, has died at age 90.
Crosby died of natural causes around 9pm on Friday at her home in Hillsborough, Calif., surrounded by family, Crosby Family representative B. Harlan Boll told Entertainment Weekly.
Born Olive Kathryn Grandstaff in West Columbia, Texas, in 1933, the actress earned a screen test with William Holden after winning a beauty contest. She launched her acting career as Kathryn Grant in 1953 following her graduation from the University of Texas at Austin, appearing in small roles in films like Rear Window with major stars like Holden, Charlton Heston, Ginger Rogers, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Jack Lemmon, and Jimmy Stewart.
During her early Hollywood days, Crosby wrote a column about the film industry for her hometown newspaper, leading her to conduct interviews on the set of White Christmas, where she met Bing Crosby in 1954. The couple married in 1957. Crosby appeared in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958 and Anatomy of a Murder in 1959, and then largely retired from acting.
“We kept meeting each other, and then we’d plan to get married, and he would have a kidney stone or something dreadful like that,” Crosby said of her late husband in a Smashing Interviews article in 2014. “We kept waiting, and I kept working. Later on, we finally managed to get married, which was a secret.”
Crosby became a registered nurse in 1963 and wrote an autobiography, Bing and Other Things, in 1967. She appeared alongside her husband and children in a number of his Christmas television specials, and also guest-starred on The Bing Crosby Show in the mid-1960s. In the 1970s, Crosby hosted her own local daytime talk show, The Kathryn Crosby Show, in San Francisco.
After Bing’s death in 1977, Crosby wrote another book, 1983’s My Life With Bing, and made a handful of appearances on TV and stage, including in the 1996 Broadway revival of State Fair. She also hosted the charitable golf match Crosby National Golf Tournament in Bermuda Run, N.C., for 16 years. Crosby married Maurice William Sullivan in 2000, and they remained married for a decade until his sudden death in a car accident in 2010.
Crosby is survived by her three children and numerous grandchildren.
