Actress and wife of Bing Crosby turned 90

Kathryn Crosby, the actress and widow of Bing Crosby, has died at the age of 90.

Crosby died of natural causes around 9 p.m. Friday at her home in Hillsborough, California, surrounded by her family, said Crosby's family representative B. Harlan Boll. Weekly entertainment.

Born in West Columbia, Texas in 1933, Olive Kathryn Grandstaff got an audition with William Holden after winning a beauty contest. She began her acting career in 1953 as Kathryn Grant after graduating from the University of Texas at Austin and appeared in small roles in films such as rear window with big stars like Holden, Charlton Heston, Ginger Rogers, Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Jack Lemmon and Jimmy Stewart.

During her early Hollywood days, Crosby wrote a column about the film industry for her hometown newspaper, which led to her doing interviews on the set of White Christmaswhere she met Bing Crosby in 1954. The couple married in 1957. Crosby appeared in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad in 1958 and Anatomy of a murder in 1959 and then largely retired from acting.

“We kept meeting and then planning to get married, and he had a kidney stone or something equally horrible,” Crosby said of her late husband in a 2014 Smashing Interviews article. “We kept waiting and I kept working. Later, we finally managed to get married, which was a secret.”

Crosby became a nurse in 1963 and wrote an autobiography, Bing and other thingsin 1967. She appeared with her husband and children in a number of his Christmas television specials and also made guest appearances in The Bing Crosby Show In the mid-1960s, Crosby hosted her own local daytime talk show, The Kathryn Crosby Showin San Francisco.

After Bing's death in 1977, Crosby wrote another book, which was published in 1983 My life with Bingand has made a handful of appearances on television and stage, including the Broadway revival of State Fair. She also hosted the Crosby National Golf Tournament charity golf tournament in Bermuda Run, North Carolina for 16 years. Crosby married Maurice William Sullivan in 2000 and the marriage lasted for a decade until his sudden death in a car accident in 2010.

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Crosby leaves behind three children and numerous grandchildren.