Actress Dina Merrill, starred in ‘Butterfield 8,’ has died at 93

Actress Dina Merrill, who starred in such films as “Butterfield 8,” “The Young Savages,” “The Sundowners,” “Caddyshack II,” “The Player” and “Operation Petticoat” has died. She was 93.

The New York Times reported Merrill “died on Monday at her home in East Hampton, N.Y. Her son, Stanley H. Rumbough, confirmed the passing and revealed she had suffered from Lewy Body dementia.”

According to the Times, Merrill was the daughter of the Wall Street broker E. F. Hutton and the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post.

She was married three times, most famously to actor Cliff Robertson, who died in 2007. Merrill was a frequent guest on television series, including “Bonanza,” “Cannon,” “The Odd Couple” and “Batman” (where she guest-starred as Calamity Jan opposite Robertson, who guest-starred on the kitschy TV series as the western bad guy, Shame).

According to The Hollywood Reporter, “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).

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