Zasu Pitts, a renowned comedienne, was born on January 3, 1894, to Rulandus and Nellie (Shay) Pitts, in Kansas, the third of four children. Her father, a New York native who lost a leg in the Civil War, relocated the family to Santa Cruz, California, when ZaSu was nine, seeking a warmer climate and better job opportunities.
Pitts attended Santa Cruz High and, despite being excessively shy, joined the school's drama department. She made her stage debut in 1915 and was discovered two years later by pioneer screenwriter Frances Marion, who got her work in small, obscure parts in vehicles for Paramount stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.
Mary Pickford cast her in another film to greater effect, and the rest is history. Pitts grew in popularity following a series of Universal one-reeler comedies and earned her first feature-length lead in King Vidor's Better Times (1919). She met and married matinée idol Tom Gallery in 1920 and paired up with him in several films.
Their daughter Ann was born in 1922. In 1924, Pitts was given the greatest tragic role of her career in Erich von Stroheim's epic classic Greed (1924),which initially shocked Hollywood but showed that she could draw tears and pathos as well as laughs with her patented doleful demeanor.
Trading off between comedy shorts and features, Pitts earned additional kudos in such heavy dramas as Sins of the Fathers (1928),The Wedding March (1928),and War Nurse (1930). By the advent of sound, she was fully secured in comedy and continued to make audiences laugh in films such as The Dummy (1929),Finn and Hattie (1931),and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935).
Pitts also excelled in her comedy partnerships with Thelma Todd and Slim Summerville. She breezed through the 1940s in assorted films, finding work in vaudeville and on radio, trading quivery banter with Bing Crosby, Al Jolson, and Rudy Vallee, among others.
She tackled Broadway, making her debut in the mystery "Ramshackle Inn" in 1944, which was written especially for her. Postwar films continued to give Pitts the chance to play comic snoops and flighty relatives, but into the 1950s she started focusing on TV, culminating in her best-known series role, playing second banana to Gale Storm in The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna (1956).
Sadly, ill health dominated Pitts' later years when she was diagnosed with cancer in the mid-1950s. She bravely carried on, continuing to work until the very end, making brief appearances in The Thrill of It All (1963) and the all-star comedy epic It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963).
Having married a second time after her divorce from Gallery, the beloved sad sack comedienne passed away at age 69 on June 6, 1963, leaving behind a gallery of scene-stealing worrywarts for all to enjoy.
