Dina Merrill, Actress, Heiress And Philanthropist, Dies At 93

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/dina-merrill-dead-butterfield-8-operation-petticoat-actress-was-93-978723



Dina Merrill, the actress, heiress and RKO executive whose blend of beauty and refinement made her the perfect woman to portray socialites on screens big and small, has died. She was 93.

Merrill died Monday at her home in East Hampton, N.Y., The New York Times reported.

As the daughter of Wall Street maverick E.F. Hutton and Marjorie Merriweather Post, heir to the Post Cereals fortune, Merrill was born into and raised in New York society, and her characters often came from upper-crust backgrounds as well.

She made her feature debut in 1957 as one of the eager young research assistants who work for TV executive Katharine Hepburn in the comedy Desk Set, and she played a long-suffering wife whose husband (Laurence Harvey) cheats on her with Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8 (1960).

In John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages (1961), Merrill portrayed the well-to-do wife of assistant district attorney Burt Lancaster, and she was a sophisticate who's not crazy about Glenn Ford's kid in The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1963).