E.J. Peaker, who portrayed the chatty hat shop assistant, Minnie Fay, in Barbra Streisand’s Hello, Dolly! and starred with Robert Morse on the innovative but short-lived ABC musical comedy show That’s Life, has died. She was 82.
Peaker died May 16 of Alzheimer’s disease at her home in Las Vegas, her husband, pilot and musician Scott Rosen, told The Hollywood Reporter.
August 1968 was quite the whirlwind month for the blond, blue-eyed Peaker, who was finishing up on 20th Century Fox’s adaptation of Hello, Dolly! (1969) — her big-screen debut — while starting work on That’s Life, a Broadway-like hourlong show created by former Honeymooners writer-producer Marvin Marx.
That’s Life was usually taped before a live audience of about 1,600 people on Fridays inside the George Abbott Theater in Manhattan, but to accommodate Peaker’s busy schedule, the first three episodes were done in Hollywood on weekends until the actress wrapped up Hello, Dolly! on the Fox lot in L.A.
A big swing for ABC, That’s Life depicted the meeting, courtship, marriage and parenthood of Morse’s Robert Dickson, a junior executive at a chalk company, and Peaker’s Gloria Quigley, a salesgirl.
