Fran Jeffries, a lithe, silky-voiced singer and dancer who performed a showstopping samba in the 1963 film The Pink Panther and tantalised Tony Curtis with a seductive performance of the title song in Sex and the Single Girl a year later, has died at her home in Los Angeles aged 79.
Jeffries was well known on the cabaret and Las Vegas circuit as the singing partner of Dick Haymes, her husband, when the director Blake Edwards added a scene in The Pink Panther to showcase her talents.
Actor Fran Jeffries in the ski chalet scene in The Pink Panther. Credit: YouTube
Dressed in a black cat-suit and singing in Italian, she slithered her way around an alpine ski chalet performing the Henry Mancini song Meglio Stasera (It Had Better Be Tonight), as the bewitched cast looked on.
As the nightclub singer Gretchen in Sex and the Single Girl, she performed three numbers. Most memorable was her teasing rendition of the title song, aimed at Curtis, her boyfriend in the film. Delivering the message that women enjoy sex, too, she treated Curtis' living room furniture as an erotic gymnasium, closing in on him as he struggled to read a book.
She was born Frances Ann Makris on May 18, 1937, in Mayfield, California. Her father, Stephen, was a Greek immigrant who moved the family to San Jose to open a restaurant when she was young. Her mother, the former Esther Gautier, was a homemaker.
In her early teens Frances won a local talent contest performing the Betty Grable song What Did I Do? She took home a Bulova watch and a sack of groceries.
After graduating from high school she began singing in San Francisco nightclubs as part of a trio. One night she found herself on the same bill with Haymes, a crooning balladeer in his 40s. They formed a duo, married and for the next several years enjoyed success in nightclubs, cabarets and Las Vegas casinos.
Jeffries' first marriage, to the pianist Ed Blasco, had ended in divorce, as would her marriage to Haymes and to three subsequent husbands. She is survived by a daughter, Stephanie Haymes-Roven, and two granddaughters.
After appearing in a bit part in the 1958 film The Buccaneer, Jeffries sang and danced her way through a brief film career. Her third husband, the director Richard Quine, cast her in two of his films, Sex and the Single Girl and, in a non-singing role, A Talent for Loving in 1969. She played the femme fatale Aishah in the Elvis Presley movie Harum Scarum in 1965.
Jeffries recorded the albums Fran Can Really Hang You Up the Most (1960), Fran Jeffries Sings of Sex and the Single Girl (1964) and This Is Fran Jeffries (1966).
In the late 1960s and early '70s she toured Europe with Sammy Davis jnr and south-east Asia with Bob Hope. She performed for decades in supper clubs and cabarets, and in 2000 recorded a set of ballads and standards, All the Love.
New York Times