Dina Merrill
Nedenia Marjorie Hutton (born
December 9,
1925) is an
American actress known as
Dina Merrill.
Born in
New York City, she is the daughter of
Wall Street stockbroker Edward Francis Hutton and
Post Cereals heiress
Marjorie Merriweather Post.
Using the
stage name Dina Merrill her first film was
Desk Set (1957), in which she played
Sylvia Blair, one of the researchers whose supervisor was
Bunny Watson (
Katharine Hepburn).
Merrill appeared regularly on television in the
1960s. For example, she did a stint as one of the
What's My Line? Mystery Guests on the popular Sunday Night
CBS-TV program, and later served as a guest panelist on the quiz show.
Dina Merrill has been married three times. Her first husband was Stanley Rumbough, Jr., an heir to the
Colgate toothpaste fortune. Married in 1946, they divorced in 1966. They had three children. Her second husband was the American actor
Cliff Robertson (married 1966, divorced 1986). They had one daughter, Heather Robertson.
Her current husband is former actor
Ted Hartley; they have been married since 1989.
A corporate remnant named
RKO Pictures was purchased by Merrill and Hartley in
1989 with a plan to resurrect it as a
motion picture production company.
On
April 6,
2005, in New York City, at the
Museum of Television and Radio, of which she is a member of the Board of Directors, Ms. Merrill introduced a screening of
Budd Schulberg's 1959 TV production
What Makes Sammy Run?. She was in this production. Mr. Schulberg was also at the screening.
Dina Merrill is a significant shareholder and director of
Lehman Brothers and serves as the chairman of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee and is a member of the Bank's Compensation and Benefits Committee. Ms. Merrill is a
presidential appointee to the Board of Trustees of the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a trustee of the
Eugene O'Neill Theater Foundation, a vice president of the New York City Mission Society, and serves on the Board of the
Juvenile Diabetes Foundation. She is also a member of the Board of
ORBIS International, a global, nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing blindness through education and transferring the medical skills to treat and prevent blindness in developing countries.
She is a
pro-choice Republican.
