Jody Gilbert (née Joe Ray Swartzburg) (March 18, 1916 – February 3, 1979) was an American character actress of radio, television, and film. She was best known for comedic roles. Her screen acting career was interrupted for over a decade by the Hollywood blacklist.
Biography
Gilbert was born in Fort Worth, Texas. She was the daughter of Reba Gilbert and Chas. Swartzburg. Gilbert studied voice and acting at Columbia University, and was a graduate of Pasadena Playhouse.
She worked as a stage actress in the mid-1930s, and began appearing in films in 1937. After numerous uncredited parts—for example, in Ninotchka (1939) she has a few seconds of screen time as Greta Garbo's roommate in Moscow—Gilbert delivered a brief but memorable performance in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941). She played a sarcastic diner waitress who engages in a verbal duel with her customer W.C. Fields.
Over the next decade, she was cast dozens of times (although still mostly uncredited) in movies and TV, often in humorous supporting roles as "sizeable" but confident women. Her most celebrated radio character was playing Rosa in Life with Luigi.
Gilbert's acting career was interrupted by the Hollywood blacklist. In November 1952, a writer named Harvey Narcisenfield testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that Gilbert was a Communist. When she was summoned before the Committee on March 26, 1953, she used the Fifth Amendment's shield against self-incrimination. But first she made light of the proceedings by invoking the Nineteenth Amendment, and joking that it gave women "equal rights to decline" to answer questions. When asked her profession by HUAC counsel Frank Tavenner, she replied, "Well, now, right at the moment my profession, I would say, is a witness." In addition to the Fifth Amendment, she also cited the Fifth Commandment ("Honor thy father and thy mother") when refusing to answer about her Communist Party membership.
After her HUAC testimony, Gilbert was barred from TV work until 1965. Her next film role was not until 1969 in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Her final screen appearances included small parts in episodes of the TV shows Sanford and Son, Police Woman, Starsky and Hutch, and Switch.
On February 3, 1979, Jody Gilbert died at her Sherman Oaks home from complications arising from an automobile accident that she had been involved in the previous autumn. She was 62.
