Helen Gallagher, who parlayed her song-and-dance skills into Tony Award-winning performances in revivals of the musicals “Pal Joey” and “No, No, Nanette,” and who turned to television to play the matriarch on the long-running soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” when theater no longer provided her a living, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 98.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Patti Specht, a friend and the executor of her will.
Ms. Gallagher was 18 when she made her Broadway debut in 1944, in the chorus of a Cole Porter revue, “Seven Lively Arts.” Over the next several decades, she worked with an A-list group of choreographers, including Jerome Robbins (“High Button Shoes”), Agnes de Mille (“Brigadoon”), Bob Fosse (“Sweet Charity”) and Donald Saddler (“No, No, Nanette”).
Ms. de Mille nearly fired her from “Brigadoon” in 1947. “Agnes wanted very lyrical work, and I’d just done ‘Billion Dollar Baby’ and everything came out bumps and grinds,” Ms. Gallagher told The New York Times in 1971.
But in 1958, when she played Ado Annie, her favorite role, in a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Oklahoma!” at New York City Center, she unexpectedly earned Ms. de Mille’s praise.
“She came in and restaged ‘All Er Nuthin’ for me, and she made it a little dance beside the song,” Ms. Gallagher said on the theater podcast “Behind the Curtain” in 2017.
“She sent me an orchid on opening night,” she added, with a note saying, “You are truly a star.”
ImageA publicity photo of Ms. Gallagher from 1957, when she was in a revival of the Broadway show “Brigadoon.”Credit...Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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