Zazu Pitts

She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1994, she was honored with her image on a United States postage stamp designed by caricaturist Al Hirschfeld. The Craterian Ginger Rogers Theater in Medford, Oregon is named in her honor. They had two children: a daughter, Ann Gallery, and a son, Don Gallery (ne Marvin Carville La Marr), whom they adopted after the death of his mother, actress Barbara La Marr. Ginger Rogers died in 1995 and was interred in the Oakwood Memorial Park Cemetery in Chatsworth, California. Pitts was married to actor Tom Gallery from 1920 to 1932. In 1961, she married her fifth husband, director and producer William Marshall, but separated from him within weeks of their marriage, eventually divorcing him in 1969. She was interred at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City. In 1953, she married her fourth husband, lawyer Jacques Bergerac (16 years her junior, he became an actor and then a cosmetics company executive); they divorced in 1957 and he soon remarried actress Dorothy Malone.

ZaSu Pitts died of cancer in Hollywood, California at age 69. In 1943, she married her third husband, Jack Briggs, a Marine; they divorced in 1949. From the 1940s through the early 1960s ZaSu Pitts also made numerous television appearances, including her role in The Gale Storm Show, Oh! Susanna (1956-1960), with Gale Storm. In 1934, she married her second husband, actor Lew Ayres (1908–1996); they separated quickly and were divorced in 1941. When Mae Questel was called on to create the screen voice of the character "Olive Oyl" for the Fleischer Studios animated cartoon version of the comic strip "Popeye", Questel created a caricature of Zazu Pitts' voice. She first married her dancing partner Jack Pepper (real name Edward Jackson Culpepper) on March 29, 1929; they divorced in 1931, having separated soon after the wedding. When Hollywood switched to talkies, Pitts, who had a distinctive nasal voice with a wavering vibrato, switched to comedy character actor roles. This close mother-daughter relationship has been proffered to explain at least in part Rogers's history of marital disappointment.

Von Stroheim also featured her in The Wedding March and Walking Down Broadway. She was a conservative Republican politically, and lived for much of her life with her mother, Lela Owens McMath Rogers (1891–1977), a Christian Scientist who was a newspaper reporter, scriptwriter, movie producer, one of the first women to enlist in the Marine Corps, and a founder of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Perhaps her most famous early role was in Erich von Stroheim's Greed (1925). In 1940 Ginger Rogers won the Academy Award for Best Actress, for her starring role in Kitty Foyle. Pitts debuted in silent film in 1917, including a number of leading roles. In 1939, she played opposite David Niven in Bachelor Mother. Her unusual first name was coined from parts of the names "Eliza" and "Susan", female relatives who both wanted ZaSu's mother to name the child after them. Her first roles were in a trio of short films made in 1929 — Night in the Dormitory, A Day of a Man of Affairs, and Campus Sweethearts.

ZaSu Pitts was born in Parsons, Kansas and grew up in Santa Cruz, California. She is most remembered as Fred Astaire's romantic interest and dancing partner in a series of ten all-singing all-dancing Hollywood musicals, but her acting career spanned over thirty years. In many of her film credits and contemporary articles, her name is rendered as Zazu Pitts. Virginia Katherine McMath (July 16, 1911 – April 25, 1995), better known as Ginger Rogers, was an American actress and dancer. ZaSu Pitts (3 January 1894 - 7 June 1963) was a United States movie actress. Variants include "Astaire gave her class, and Rogers gave him sex" and "He gave her class, and she gave him sex.". "Fred gave Ginger class, and Ginger gave Fred sex." Katharine Hepburn, actress.

"Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, and she did it backwards and in high heels." Faith Whittlesey, former US ambassador to Switzerland. Responsibility for this quote also has been traced to a 1982 Frank and Ernest cartoon.