"Rose Marie" is a popular song from the musical or operetta of the same name. In the original Broadway production in 1924 it was performed by Dennis King and Arthur Deagon as the characters Jim Kenyon and Sergeant Malone.

The music was written by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart, the lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II, and became a hit in 1955 for country music singer Slim Whitman.

Produced by Lew Chudd, Whitman's recording of the song spent 11 weeks at #1 in the UK - setting a record which was not beaten until 1991, when Bryan Adams spent 16 weeks at the top of the chart with "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You".

Rose Marie (born August 15, 1923) is an American actress. As a child performer she had a successful singing career as Baby Rose Marie.

A veteran of vaudeville, Rose Marie's career includes film, records, theater, night clubs, and television. Her most famous role was television comedy writer Sally Rogers on the CBS situation comedy The Dick Van Dyke Show. She later portrayed Myrna Gibbons on CBS's The Doris Day Show and was also a frequent panelist on the game show Hollywood Squares.

Rose Marie Mazetta was born in New York City, New York, to Italian-American Frank Mazzetta and Polish-American Stella Gluszcak. At the age of three, she started performing under the name "Baby Rose Marie." At five, Rose Marie became a radio star on NBC and made a series of films.

Rose Marie was a nightclub performer in her teenage years before becoming a radio comedian. She was billed then as "The Darling of the Airwaves." According to her autobiography, Hold the Roses, she was assisted in her career by many members of organized crime, including Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel. She performed at the opening night of the Flamingo Hotel which was built by Siegel.

Richard Wayne "Dick" Van Dyke (born December 13, 1925) is an American actor, comedian, writer, and producer with a career spanning six decades. He is the older brother of Jerry Van Dyke and father of Barry Van Dyke. Van Dyke starred in the films Bye Bye Birdie, Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and in the TV series The Dick Van Dyke Show and Diagnosis: Murder. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Blvd.

Van Dyke was born in West Plains, Missouri, to Loren (nickname "Cookie") and Hazel (born McCord) Van Dyke, but he grew up in Danville, Illinois. He is the older brother of actor Jerry Van Dyke, who is best known for his role on the TV series Coach. His grandson, Shane Van Dyke, is also an actor, and directed Titanic II. He is of Dutch descent on his father's side, and his mother was a descendant of Mayflower passenger Peter Browne from England.

Ottis Dewey Whitman, Jr. (born January 20, 1924), known professionally as Slim Whitman, and early in his career as "The Smiling Starduster", is an American country music singer and songwriter, known for his yodelling abilities. He has sold in excess of 120 million albums in unit sales and has had numerous successful recordings. He is consistently more popular throughout Europe, and in particular Britain, than in his native America, particularly with his covers of pop standards and movie songs . His 1955 hit single "Rose Marie" held the Guinness World Record for the longest time at number 1 on the UK charts until Bryan Adams broke the record in 1991 after 36 years. In the U.S., his "Indian Love Call" (1952) and "Secret Love" (1953) reached number 2 on the Billboard country chart. Whitman had a string of hits from the mid 1960s and into the 1970s and became known to a new generation of fans through TV marketing in the 1980s. Throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century, he has continued to tour extensively around the world and release new material, and he was featured on the soundtrack of the 1996 film Mars Attacks!. In 2010 a new album, called Twilight on the Trail, was released featuring brand new material produced by his son Byron and featuring the single "Back in the Saddle Again."

Andrew Geoffrey "Andy" Kaufman (January 17, 1949 – May 16, 1984) was an American entertainer, actor and performance artist. While often referred to as a comedian, Kaufman did not consider himself to be one. He disdained telling jokes and engaging in comedy as it was traditionally understood, referring to himself instead as a "song-and-dance man." Elaborate hoaxes and pranks were major elements of his career. His act maintains a cult following and he continues to be respected among comedians for his original material, performance style, and unflinching commitment to character.

Kaufman was born in New York City, on January 17, 1949, the first son of Janice (née Bernstein) and Stanley Kaufman. He grew up in a middle-class Jewish family, in Great Neck, Long Island, New York, and began performing at age nine. He attended the now defunct two-year Grahm Junior College, in Boston, graduating in 1971. He then began performing stand-up comedy at various small clubs along the East Coast.

Kaufman first caught major attention with a character known as Foreign Man, who claimed to be from Caspiar (a fictional island in the Caspian Sea) and would appear on the stage of comedy clubs to play a recording of the theme from the Mighty Mouse cartoon show and sing only the chorus. He would proceed to tell a few jokes and perform a number of impersonations such as television character Archie Bunker or President Richard Nixon. Some variations of this performance were broadcast in the first season of Saturday Night Live; the Mighty Mouse number was featured in the October 11, 1975 premiere, while the joke-telling and Bunker impression were included in the November 8 broadcast that same fall.