Meet Rose Marie. Blessed with a remarkable singing voice for a child, she began her epic career in vaudeville at the age of three as Baby Rose Marie. By the time she was five, she had her own radio show on NBC. Her film debut was as her self in a Vitaphone musical short that appeared on the bill with The Jazz Singer at its premiere in 1927. Since then she's "left them laughing" for nine decades, having traversed through every 20th century entertainment medium as a singer and brilliant comedienne. Vitagraph Films, opens the new documentary Wait for Your Laugh, in Los Angeles on November 17 at the Laemmle Royal Theatre in Santa Monica and The Laemmle Town Center in Encino. Additional shows will take place at the famed Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood.
Shot on 35mm and 16mm film stock, the biographical documentary tells the story of the longest active career in entertainment. The film also contains amazing behind-the-scenes color footage from Rose Marie's personal collection, chronicling what went on backstage on The Dick Van Dyke Show and other sets. It also looks at what it was like to be a female performer in the 20th century to work through periods of extreme personal heartbreak, and casts an eye on how Rose Marie and her fellow nonagenarians Dick Van Dyke, Carl Reiner and Peter Marshall, still have the drive to keep working today.
With The Dick Van Dyke Show, she was part of the cast of one of the most iconic television shows of the 1960s playing a lady TV writer who held her own with the boys in a time when such things just weren't done. Of course Rose Marie was far more than just the sassy Sally Rogers on The Dick Van Dyke Show, and later the top center square on Hollywood Squares. Rose Marie worked in every facet of showbiz. She worked in Vegas, Broadway, movies, television, theatre, concert halls and nightclubs. Along the way she was known as "the kid" by the mob. She called Al Capone, Uncle, opened the Flamingo at the birth of Las Vegas, for Bugsy Seigel, and had her career protected and nurtured by "the boys" who controlled so many nightclub stages across the country.
Her friends include the best show business has to offer: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Johnny Mercer, Jerry Lewis, Johnny Carson, Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby to name a few. Unbeknownst to fans, Rose Marie, who was always playing the woman always looking for a man, was happily married for almost 20 years to the love of her life, Bobby Guy, a professional trumpeter. His untimely passing and its impact on Rose Marie is recounted by her friends Peter Marshall, Carl Reiner, Dick Van Dyke, and Tim Conway.
Truly an extraordinary woman with an extraordinary life, Rose Marie is a living, breathing time capsule of American show business. Wait For Your Laugh is the kind of film that pays tribute to both the woman and the world in which she lived. Be sure to catch it while you can.