Emmy-award winning actress and singer Polly Bergen, who played the terrorised wife in the original Cape Fear has died aged 84.
Bergen died on Saturday at her home in Connecticut from natural causes, surrounded by family and friends, said publicist Judy Katz.
A brunette beauty with a warm, sultry singing voice, Bergen was a household name from her 20s onward.
She made albums and played leading roles in films, stage musicals and TV dramas. She also hosted her own variety series, was a popular game show panellist, and founded a thriving beauty products company that bore her name.
In recent years, she played Felicity Huffman's mother on Desperate Housewives and the past mistress of Tony Soprano's late father on The Sopranos.
Bergen won an Emmy in 1958 portraying the tragic singer Helen Morgan on the famed anthology series Playhouse 90. She was nominated for another Emmy in 1989 for best supporting actress in a miniseries or special for War and Remembrance.
Bergen was 20 and an established singer when she starred with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in her first movie, At War With the Army. She joined them in two more comedies, That's My Boy and The Stooge.
In 1953, she made her Broadway debut with Harry Belafonte in the revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac. In 1957-58 she starred on the musical-variety The Polly Bergen Show on NBC, closing every broadcast with her theme song, The Party's Over.
Also during the 1950s, she became a regular on the popular game show To Tell the Truth.
Bergen became a regular in TV movies and miniseries, most importantly in the 1983 epic The Winds of War and the 1988 sequel, War and Remembrance. She appeared as the troubled wife of high-ranking Navy officer Pug Henry, played by Robert Mitchum.
Mitchum also had the key role in the landmark 1962 suspense film, Cape Fear, as the sadistic ex-convict who terrorises a lawyer (Gregory Peck) and his wife (Bergen) and daughter because he blames Peck for sending him to prison. The film was remade in 1991 by Martin Scorsese.
In 1964's Kisses for My President, Bergen was cast as the first female US president, with Fred MacMurray as First Gentleman.
Among her other films were Move Over, Darling (1963) with Doris Day and James Garner, Susan Seidelman's 1987 Making Mr Right, and John Waters' 1990 Cry-Baby, with Johnny Depp.
She founded the successful cosmetics company Polly Bergen Co in 1966 and sold it in 1973 to Faberge.
In the 2001 Broadway revival of Follies, composer Stephen Sondheim gave her the role of a faded star who sings of her ups and downs, including the show-stopping song, I'm Still Here. She was nominated for a Tony award for her role.
Nellie Paulina Burgin was born in 1930 in Knoxville, Tennessee, and her family later moved to California where she began her career singing on radio in her teens.
In 1982, after two previous marriages, she married entrepreneur Jeff Endervelt, giving him millions to invest from her beauty company profits.
The stock market crash of the 1980s wiped out the investments.
After divorcing him in 1991, she said he left her with so many debts she had to sell her New York apartment and other belongings to avoid bankruptcy.
She also battled emphysema and other ailments in the late 1990s, a result of 50 years of smoking.
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