Bergen played the former mistress of Tony Soprano’s late father, the threatened wife role in the original Cape Fear, and Felicity Huffman’s mother in Desperate Housewives.
She played the first female President of the USA in Kisses for My President. At the age of 20, she starred with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in her first movie, At War With the Army. She was with them in two more comedies, That’s My Boy and The Stooge.
Bergen died at her home in Connecticut. A smoker for 50 years, she suffered from emphysema since the late 1990s.
Nellie Paulina Burgin was born in 1930 in Knoxville, Tennessee, into a family that on occasion had to resort to welfare to survive.
A celebrated singer earlier in her career, she released a number of albums and played leading roles in films, stage musicals and TV dramas. She presented her own variety series, and was a game show panelist.
Fiercely ambitious, Bergen also established a beauty products company, arriving at her office at 9am each day. She sold the company in 1973 to Faberge, but remained on for a couple of years to manage it as a Faberge subsidiary
Bergen won an Emmy in 1958, for her role as the hapless singer singer Helen Morgan in the anthology series Playhouse 90. She was nominated for a further Emmy in 1989 (Best Supporting Actress ) for War and Remembrance.
Other films included 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.
“It was very difficult at the beginning,” the actress declared in 2001, “because everybody considered me just another bubble-headed actress.”
She married and divorced three times.
