Kay Medford high school and working as a nightclub waitress. She was the original "Mama" in "Bye Bye Birdie" on Broadway, garnering excellent reviews, but lost the film role to Maureen Stapleton. Medford appeared in the Warner Bros. rock and roll film, "Jamboree" (1957). She made her Broadway debut in 1951 in the musical "Paint Your Wagon". She was cast in "Carousel" before she appeared onstage in "Funny Girl" as the mother of Fanny Brice (played by Barbra Streisand); for this performance she was nominated for a 1964 Tony Award for Featured Actress (Musical), and when she repeated the role in the
Fanny Brice 1938. Six months after her "Big Show" appearance, on May 29, 1951, Brice died at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood from a cerebral hemorrhage at 11:15 a.m.; she was 59. The May 29, 1951, episode of "The Baby Snooks Show" was broadcast as a memorial to Brice who created the brattish toddler, crowned by Hanley Stafford's brief on-air eulogy: "We have lost a very real, a very warm, a very wonderful woman." Brice was cremated, and her ashes were interred in the Chapel Mausoleum at the Jewish Home of Peace Cemetery in East Los Angeles, California. A half-century