Her husband, the actor Felice Orlandi, died in 2003. Ghostley is survived by her sister, Gladys. ![]() Ironically, given the comic bent of her work, she won her Tony Award for a dramatic role in Lorraine Hansberry's second and last work The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window. Ghostley played a wide variety of characters in A Thurber Carnival, a revue based on the work of humorist and cartoonist James Thurber that ran for nine months in 1960. Another ill-fated musical, Shangri-La, followed in 1956. In 1954 she appeared in the short-lived musical Sandhog and the next year in the Leonard Bernstein-composed "Trouble in Tahiti" section of All in One. In it, she sang "Boston Beguine," written by a neophyte songwriter named Sheldon Harnick. Alice Ghostley made her Broadway debut in Leonard Sillman's New Faces of 1952, alongside Eartha Kitt and Paul Lynde. She was Esmeralda, the inept witch on the 1960s sitcom "Bewitched," and oddball neighbor Bernice on the 1980s comedy "Designing Women." She made appearances on dozens of other television shows, including "Evening Shade" and "Love, American Style," employing her trademark quavering voice, which lent added comic spin to her punchlines. Ghostley was an expert at playing dim or eccentric characters who throw straight arrows off balance with a mix of retiring sweetness, wacky logic and bold opinion. She is best known to television audiences as Esmeralda in the 1960s series Bewitched and as Bernice Clifton in Designing Women. Diminutive with small eyes and a pixieish haircut, Ms. A character performer of television, stage and films, she won a Tony Award for her role in the Broadway production of The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window.
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