Virginia Curtis, Sparkling Witch, 1954

Virginia Curtis (1928–2004) had a brief and modest career on television as a “comedienne” (the feminine and the diminutive of “comedian”—both apply in this case but I have always thought it was a stupid word). Here is the snipe, which is dated 23 October 1954:

Going my Way?

Who wouldn’t accept a Halloween lift from as attractive a witch as Virginia Curtis, featured comedienne on Sid Caesar’s television show (8 to 9 P.M., E.S.T., Mondays).

As Wikipedia explains (here), Caesar’s Hour (1954–57) was “a live, hour-long American sketch comedy television program.” Sid Caesar, the eponymous “comedienne” (diminutive) of this show, describes the sketch series that featured Curtis in Caesar’s Hours: My Life in Comedy, with Love and Laughter (2005), on p. 164ff. The regular sketch was called “The Commuters” and it involved three couples—two of them foils for Caesar—struggling with the challenges of upward mobility. (Yes, that is how he describes it.)

Curtis is mentioned only as one of the five women who played the wife of one of these foils. Unless they were Mormons—which seems unlikely from Caesar’s description—it seems that these five women took it in turns playing the role of a wife, a role so undistinguished that they do not warrant differentiation or, indeed, any further reference in the whole book. I discovered elsewhere that Curtis played the character “Betty Hansen” from 1954–55. Despite the fact that Caesar’s Hour featured the likes of Joan Crawford and Peggy Lee most of the original recordings were destroyed by NBC, so we are unlikely to discover anything more about Curtis’s role.

However, although Curtis had a brief and modest career on television, she is significant on this blog as the first television actor to achieve immortality as a sexy witch in a press photo.