Broadway and film character actress Grace Keagy, who was featured in several Arizona Theatre Company productions during the decade she lived in Tucson, has died.
She had been living in Rochester, N.Y., for the last few years and died Sunday of ovarian cancer. She was 87.
Keagy was raised by her paternal grandparents in Youngstown, Ohio. Her mother and maternal grandmother were Broadway actresses in the 1920s, and Keagy rarely saw them when she was a child.
A performer in her own right, Keagy began taking piano lessons at age 7 and was performing for audiences by the time she was 11. At 17, she was sent to the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, where she majored in piano and voice, and studied opera.
A brief marriage produced two children, and she had three more with her second husband, Robert Keagy, who died several years ago. Robert Keagy was a career military man, and the family traveled to posts throughout the United States and Germany for two decades. When he retired in 1964, the couple settled in Minneapolis, and Grace Keagy began acting at the Guthrie Theater. A few years later, at the age of 52, Keagy moved to New York, determined to perform on Broadway.
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"I decided I couldn't wait anymore," Keagy said in a 1998 Arizona Daily Star article. "I decided to try my luck in New York. When I got there, I sent out photos and résumés. Nobody wanted me. They probably thought: 'What is this dumpy woman doing here? Is she crazy?' "
Her luck changed at the now-closed Equity Library Theatre, where actors and actresses worked for free, and producers went to scout for talent. After receiving a positive review in the New York Times for her performance in "Call Me Madam," agents began booking her. She was in 1981's "Woman of the Year" with Lauren Bacall at Broadway's Palace Theatre, where Keagy's grandmother had appeared decades earlier.
"I remember standing on the stage and thinking, 'I wonder where my grandmother stood?' It was as though emotions were coming out of the floorboards," Keagy said.
She performed in seven Broadway productions in 10 years before semiretiring with her husband to Tucson, where "she fell completely in love with this city and the mountains," said her daughter, Katherine Nanosky.
Keagy's first Arizona Theatre Company role was in 1989's "Quilters." She followed up two years later with the staring role in "She Stoops to Conquer."
While living in Tucson, Keagy appeared in several films, including "Mrs. Santa Claus" with Angela Lansbury; "Lightning Jack" with Paul Hogan and Cuba Gooding Jr.; and "Roosters" with Edward James Olmos, Sonia Braga and Maria Conchita Alonso.
In 2000, Keagy and her husband moved to Rochester to live near another daughter.
In addition to Nanosky, of Tucson, Keagy is survived by children Michael Keagy of Ohio, Elizabeth Kowalke of New York, Claudia Brewington of Minnesota, David Keagy of California and stepson Robert Keagy of California.
