Emmy-winning actress Polly Bergen-who passed away at 84 on Saturday-is likely best known for her role in the original “Cape Fear,” a 1962 J. Lee Thompson-directed thriller starring Robert Mitchum as a vengeful ex-convict terrorizing a lawyer and his wife (Gregory Peck and Bergen).
But Bergen also played the first female president in Curtis Bernhardt’s 1964 “Kisses for My President”-a role that’s far more in line with who the actress was in real life.
Bergen-also an accomplished singer who recorded albums and performed in Broadway musicals-was a dynamic businesswoman and strong women’s rights activist. She created and ran a successful cosmetics company that she sold to Faberge in 1973 and she was a staunch political supporter of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
“She always thought a woman president in real life was long overdue,” says her nearly career-long manager Jan McCormack. “She campaigned vigorously for Hillary when she ran against Obama; she went up to people’s doors and rang their bells.”
Rex Reed, film and theater critic for The New York Observer, was a close friend of Bergen’s for more than 50 years. He says Bergen was a legendary “A-list, New York Oscar party host”-he remembers watching the Oscars one year on Bergen’s bed while sitting in between Paul Newman and Lucille Ball-but Bergen was even more passionate about women’s rights, he says.