Felicia Farr


Felicia Farr is a former American actress and model.

Early years

Farr was born in Westchester County, New York, the daughter of Sylvia and Max Dines. Her parents were of Russian Jewish and Romanian Jewish descent. She attended Erasmus Hall High School and studied sociology at Penn State.

Career

Farr began modeling lingerie at age 15. In 1955, she told a wire-service reporter, "I was under age and over-developed... The agency claimed I was 19 because a state law required underage lingerie models to be chaperoned."
She appeared in several modeling photo shoots and advertisements during the 1950s and 1960s. In 1955, she signed a seven-year contract with Columbia Pictures. Her earliest screen appearances date from the mid-1950s and included the Westerns Jubal and , both starring Glenn Ford and The Last Wagon starring Richard Widmark.
Farr's later films include the bawdy Billy Wilder farce Kiss Me, Stupid with Dean Martin and Ray Walston as her husband, a role originally intended for Jack Lemmon; Walter Matthau's daughter-in-law in Kotch ; the Don Siegel bank-heist caper Charley Varrick with Matthau; and more than 30 TV appearances on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Bonanza, Ben Casey, Burke's Law, and many others.

Personal life

On September 2, 1949, Dines married actor Lee Farr, a marriage which produced a daughter, Denise Farr, who later became the wife of actor Don Gordon. Farr's second husband was actor Jack Lemmon; they married in 1962 while Lemmon was filming the comedy Irma La Douce in Paris. They remained married until his death in 2001.
During her marriage to Jack Lemmon, Farr gave birth to a daughter, Courtney, in 1966. She is also the stepmother of Lemmon's son, actor and author Chris Lemmon, from his first marriage.

Selected filmography