June Walker Rogers, a singer, dancer and comedian who performed on Broadway and television and wrote several musicals and a book about how to survive in show business, has died. She was 97.
She died July 8 at her home in Westport, Connecticut, her family announced.
Born in Steubenville, Ohio, and raised in Queens, June L. Walker started dancing at age 5 and soon had a nightclub act, appearing on bills with the likes of Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Louis Prima, Don Rickles, Rodney Dangerfield and, when he was known as the singer “Calypso Gene,” Louis Farrakhan.
After being placed in an accelerated pilot program for gifted children in the New York school system, she graduated from high school at 15. She accepted a scholarship to Columbia University but left college to make her Broadway debut in 1944 in the comedy revue Laffing Room Only, starring Ole Olsen & Chic Johnson.
The platinum blond returned to Broadway in 1959 to work alongside Bert Lahr and Dick Van Dyke in The Girls Against the Boys.
Walker Rogers starred in Guys & Dolls with Tony Bennett and Little Me with Orson Bean and in such other musicals as Bells Are Ringing, Mame and Oklahoma. She also starred with Hal Linden and Rance Howard during her career.
On television, she appeared on programs hosted by Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Jackie Gleason and Ed Sullivan, who brought her to perform at the White House for Presidents Truman and Eisenhower.
After starting a family, she turned to writing, contributing to such musicals as All American, written with Charles Strouse and Lee Adams; The Dream on Royal Street, written with Alan Menken and her late husband, David Rogers; and 45 Minutes From Broadway, based on the work of George M. Cohan.
Her play Heidi was produced at the Ambassador Auditorium in Pasadena to introduce cultural arts to California schools, and her 1986 book, How to Make It in Showbiz: A Survival Kit, was read in university theater departments across the country.
In later years, she returned to the stage to perform opposite George Grizzard in The Perfect Party at the Westport Country Playhouse and with family members in The Perfect Wedding.
A longtime resident of Westport, she was a founding member of the Theater Artists Workshop of Westport and a member of the National League of American Pen Women.
Survivors include her daughters, Dulcy (and her husband, actor Diedrich Bader) and Amanda (former wife of Frank Ferrante, the famed Groucho Marx impersonator), and her grandchildren, Lucy, Sebastian, Dashiell and Ondine.
She and David Rogers, the composer, actor and Tony-nominated lyricist, were married for 50 years until his death in 2013.
