Welles was monkeying around and Gardner suddenly ad-libbed-"for a guy with a broken ankle you certainly step on a lot of laughs." Archie (Ed Gardner) was roughing up one of the guests-this time Orson Welles, who was tossing the words with Archie, but sitting down, for he had a broken ankle. ![]() Out of hundreds of auditioners for the Miss Duffy part to replace Shirley Booth she won by an accent-Brooklyn, of course.įlorence says the funniest experience she's ever had in radio happened in Duffy's Tavern-and she'll probably say that again and again. Florence went to law school there but didn't let the wherefores and whereases interfere with getting before the camera with her brother and with Bonita Granville.īut before that, she had gotten herself off to a fine start in radio at the age of 5 by singing on "The Children's Hour" and falling off her platform in the middle of it, thereby furnishing her own sound effects.Īt 12 on the March of Time program she did Mae West and skipped lightly from that to Shirley Temple all in the same night.īefore joining Duffy she was heard with Colonel Stoopnagle, and on the Kate Smith hour. She's the new Miss Duffy of Duffy's Tavern: Florence Halop, pert, 20, red-haired, green-eyed, microphonic mimic and character actress.īrother Billy Halop was a Dead End Kid of Broadway and Hollywood fame and his career moved the family from New York to California. SHE'S a Dead End Kid sister-she played Mae West at the age of 12. The New Help at Duff’s Tavern in Florence Halop Three years later, a New York Daily News story has only aged her by a year. Child and teenage stars were known to shave a few years off and keep them off through adulthood (Arnold Stang, Walter Tetley, Janet Waldo) to improve their employment chances. Here’s a story from one of the newspaper magazine supplements of December 12, 1943. She found Gardner a little too difficult to get along with and quit, only to return several years later after a revolving door of actresses in the part. Halop amusingly recalled once how critic John Crosby referred to her as “the Grover Cleveland of Miss Duffys in that she is the only one with a split administration.” She took over the role after the first Miss Duffy, Shirley Booth, divorced her husband, Duffy creator Ed Gardner. Her best known role was that of Miss Duffy on Duffy’s Tavern. She was busy on radio in the ‘40s, being a regular on several shows, including Passion DiMaggio on the Jack Paar show. Halop’s role on Durante was so well-known, the characters in the book, movie and TV series “M*A*S*H” could play with it when referring to Major Margaret Houlihan. She put on 40 pounds of padding for the role, as she had barely turned 30 and looked more like the character she had been playing on Jimmy Durante’s radio show in the late ‘40s, Hot Breath Houlihan.Īnd she certainly didn’t look like she did when she appeared on a 15-minute show on WSGH in Brooklyn in 1929. What you saw on screen back then wasn’t what she looked like, either. That’s not how she looked about 30 years earlier, when she played the mother on Meet Millie. That’s how everyone remembers Florence Halop, who had a short but memorable career on Night Court in the mid-‘80s. ![]() ![]() Short with huge glasses and a voice from a Brooklyn frog pond.
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