Beverly D'Angelo

The couple broke up soon after the children's birth and have battled over their custody ever since. But as a young actress she had specialised in straight female-leads in musical comedies, where the cardinal rule was to make space for the featured comedian. Perhaps the joke was not entirely on her. They are the parents of twins Olivia and Anton, who were born in 2001. In her interviews and press profiles she preserved the myth of her on-screen character - the rich, regal woman who never quite understood the joke - and claimed she had returned reluctantly to acting as a result of widowhood. In 1997, D'Angelo became involved with the actor Al Pacino. She also played some dramatic parts. Later she began a relationship with Anton Furst, an Academy award-winning production designer, who committed suicide in 1991 after they broke up. Fields (in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break), Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Jack Benny and Danny Kaye.

From 1985 until 1991, D'Angelo, still married to the duke, lived with director and novelist Neil Jordan. She also played the same type with W.C. The duke married, as his second wife, Valentina Bonomo, and now has one child, Francesco (born 2000). Her last movie was What a Way to Go! in 1964, in which she played Shirley MacLaine's mother. Separated in 1983, the Duke and Duchess Salviati finally divorced in 1995. Her first feature film was the Marx Brothers movie The Cocoanuts in 1929 in which she played Mrs Potter, the same role she played in the stage version from which the film was adapted. After the end of her romance with director Milos Forman, in 1981, D'Angelo married Lorenzo Salviati, an economics student who also was an Italian duke (1957-); half-Polish, he is a descendant of Lorenzo di Medici. Over the course of her lifetime she played in 40 movies, not including some minor silent work.

Her role as Ellen Griswold was reprised in three Vacation sequels from 1985 through 1997. Groucho once said a lot of people believed they were married in real life, but they were not. Her biggest break came with Chevy Chase in the 1983 National Lampoon film Vacation. They include Mrs Rittenhouse in Animal Crackers, Mrs Claypool in A Night at the Opera, Mrs Gloria Teasdale in Duck Soup, Martha Phelps in The Big Store, Mrs Susan Dewkesbury in At the Circus, and Emily Upjohn in A Day at the Races. She is a singer and actress. After gaining minor roles in movies including Annie Hall, D'Angelo had a string of hit movies in the late 1970s, appearing in Every Which Way but Loose, Hair, and Coal Miner's Daughter (she portrayed the singer Patsy Cline). Dumont played wealthy high-society widows whom Groucho alternately insulted and romanced for their money. Beverly D'Angelo was born in Columbus, Ohio on November 15, 1951. (There were in fact five Marx brothers, but only a maximum of four ever performed together.).

Groucho called her practically the fifth Marx brother. Margaret Dumont was the stage-name of American comic actor Daisy Juliette Baker (October 20, 1889 - March 6, 1965), remembered mostly for being the comic foil to Groucho Marx in seven of the Marx Brothers movies.