At the late unlamented Emmy Awards ceremony, Carl Reiner, accepting a statuette for The Dick Van Dyke Show, said, “Last year I thanked everybody but Ann Morgan Guilbert. So thank you, Ann Morgan Guilbert.”
This, of course, caused many persons to ask, “Who is Ann Morgan Guilbert?”
Here is who she is:
First of all, she plays the gabby scatterbrained neighbor, Millie Helper, in The Dick Van Dyke Show. (“When Carl Reiner came to California the first time, he saw me in a Billy Barnes Revue and came backstage afterward to tell us all how much he liked the show. Later, when we took the show to New York, he came to see it again. So, when he needed a neighbor for The Dick Van Dyke Show, he thought of me. I think I’m the only person he even considered. It was very nice of him, because I was pregnant at the time. But he apparently didn’t mind having a big, fat neighbor.”)
An only child, Ann Morgan Guilbert was born in Minneapolis, but as her father, Dr. Gerald Guilbert, was with the Veterans’ Administration, the family moved many times during her early years – to Tucson, Arizona, and Asheville, North Carolina, and Livermore, California, and El Paso, Texas. (When you’re the new kid in school every year or so, you have a very big loneliness. I never seemed to learn what it would be like, I’d jump for joy at the thought of moving, and then there would be those first awful weeks when you don't have a friend. I always liked to pretend. When we lived in Asheville – I was 8 or 9 at the time – a new bride lived next door to us. She gave me some of her old clothes – an evening dress and a big picture hat and an old fox fur. But nobody wanted to play dress-up with me as much as I wanted to play dress-up.”)
She eventually was graduated from high school in Milwaukee and then went to Stanford. (“I was going to be a nurse, probably because my father was a doctor and I’d been around hospitals all my life. Plus wanting to serve – I think all girls have that. But then I flunked chemistry. Right after that I saw a notice in the college paper that they were going to do ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ I thought, ‘I can play Topsy as well as anybody.’ I got the part and ended up majoring in theater arts. I found out that I liked to make people laugh. I never wanted to be an actress in the sense of going to Broadway, though. I always wanted to be married.”)
At Stanford she became engaged to a fellow theater arts student, George Eckstein. They both were graduated in 1950 and were married in 1951. (“George decided to go to law school, and I got a job as a legal secretary. I was very good at it, too. But in the summer, when George was on vacation, I would quit my job and we’d both go to Ashland, Oregon, for the Shakespeare Festival. I played whatever nutty ladies were available. After George got out of law school he was drafted and sent to El Paso, and I went with him. We were both active in the Little Theater there. George didn’t practice law very long after he got out of the Army. He ended up producing ‘The Billy Barnes Revue’ that Carl Reiner saw me in, and now he is associate producer of The Fugitive. I always called myself Ann Guilbert, but when I joined the Screen Actors Guild there was another actress named Anne Gilbert – with an ‘e’ and without the ‘u’ – so they told me I’d have to change my name. I decided on Amy first but changed my mind and used Ann Morgan Guilbert, which is my real name. Morgan was my mother’s maiden name. An ancestor of hers, William Brewster, came over on the Mayflower. There haven’t been many actresses with three names – Minnie Maddern Fiske, Mary Miles Minter, Mary Tyler Moore and me.”)
Ann Morgan Guilbert and George Eckstein now live in Pacific Palisades, California, with their two children, Nora, 10, and Hallie, 3. (“They are both sort of old-fashioned-looking little girls. Nora is a lady, and Hallie is a nut. The little nut has hair like Elsa Lanchester. But they’re both gorgeous and we love ‘em.”)
So, that’s who Ann Morgan Guilbert is.