Buff Cobb
| Buff Cobb | |
|---|---|
Cobb in 1957.
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| Born |
Patrizia Cobb Chapman October 19, 1927 Florence, Italy |
| Died | July 12, 2010 (aged 82) Lebanon, New Hampshire |
| Occupation | Actress, television personality, producer |
| Years active | 1940s–1970s |
| Spouse(s) |
Greg Bautzer William Eythe (m. 1947–1948; divorced) Mike Wallace (m. 1949–1955/1957; divorced) H. Spencer Martin (until 1987; his death) |
Buff Cobb (October 19, 1927 – July 12, 2010) was an American actress and, with then-husband Mike Wallace, host of one of television's first talk shows.
Patrizia Cobb Chapman was born in Florence, Italy, to opera singer Frank Chapman, whose own father was the ornithologist and pioneering writer of field guides Frank Michler Chapman, and playwright Elizabeth Cobb, whose father was the author and humorist Irvin S. Cobb. When she was young, her parents divorced and her father married mezzo-soprano opera singer Gladys Swarthout.
Her family moved first to New York City and then to Santa Monica, California, where Cobb graduated from high school. She began her acting career with stock companies, and then won bit parts in movies including Anna and the King of Siam (1946), and toured with Tallulah Bankhead in Noël Coward's play Private Lives from 1946 to 1948.
At 19, she married Greg Bautzer, the first of her four husbands, divorcing him after six months. At 20, she married her second husband, actor William Eythe, in Manhattan in 1947. She sued for divorce after seven months, but reconsidered two days later before going on with the divorce in 1948.
Cobb, while touring with Private Lives in Chicago, Illinois, met broadcast journalist Mike Wallace. As Wallace later recalled,
Buff Cobb was in Chicago when I got out of the Navy in '46. I think she was playing with Tallulah Bankhead in Private Lives at the time. She was an actress and a bit of a glamorous figure to me at that time. So I succumbed and taught her how to do interviewing, and we did a husband-and-wife broadcast for a while on NBC [radio] in Chicago. The interview show stopped first, and the marriage shortly thereafter. Maybe it was vice versa.
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