Actress Sondra Lee Dies at Age 97

Sondra Lee died of natural causes in her New York City apartment on Monday evening, February 23, at age 97. Her death was announced by friend and colleague Rev. Joshua Ellis, a former Broadway press agent who is now an interspiritual minister. Lee created the roles of Tiger Lily opposite Mary Martin in Peter Pan on Broadway and on television, and Minnie Fay in the original production of Hello, Dolly!

Lee was born Sondra Lee Gash on September 30, 1928, in Newark, New Jersey, to David and Belle Gash, and worked for nine decades as a dancer, actor, teacher, author, stage director, playwright, theater and film consultant, and painter.

Lee studied ballet, with the endorsement of prima ballerina Alexandra Danilova, at Studio 61 in Carnegie Hall with Vera Nemtchinova and Edward Caton, and as a teenager joined the revue Hi, Neighbor in the Catskills.

In 1947, Lee auditioned for a new Broadway musical High Bottom Shoes for choreographer Jerome Robbins, which led to a lifelong friendship. The two reunited for Peter Pan in 1954. Peter Pan was the first full-length Broadway production filmed for color TV.

After performing in Paris and touring with Robbins’s Ballets: U.S.A. troupe, Lee returned to Broadway in the Feydeau farce Hotel Paradiso, starring Bert Lahr and Angela Lansbury, and Sunday in New York, starring Robert Redford.

The original production of Hello, Dolly!, directed and choreographed by Gower Champion, opened at the St. James Theatre on January 16, 1964.

Lee’s last public appearance was at Carnegie Hall on June 23, 2025, at the Transport Group’s Hello, Dolly!, In Concert, as the musical’s last surviving original principal company member.

She wrote a memoir, I’ve Slept with Everybody: A Memoir, which chronicled her lifelong friendship with Marlon Brando and her romantic flings, and at the time of her death, she was deep into writing a second book, Snapshots Redux.