She was born in Boston, Massachusetts and began singing as a child. She moved to New York and landed a job as a featured nightclub performer. She became a lounge singer, mingling song with ad-libbed comedy, and was featured on televsion on "The Perry Como Show" and "The Ed Sullivan Show".
She made her stage debut in 1962 in The World of Jules Feiffer, a Jules Feiffer play directed by Mike Nichols, with music by Stephen Sondheim. She made her Broadway debut in "Nowhere to Go But Up" which ran only two weeks but earned her outstanding reviews. She appeared in a series of commercial failures (The Fig Leaves Are Falling ran for four performances) which nonetheless garnered her favorable reviews and a nomination for a Tony Award in 1969. She looked back on these with typical humor, once answering the comment "Miss Loudon, I saw you in Comedy Tonight with the response, "Oh, you poor thing! I feel so bad for you!"
She married Norman Paris, a composer who arranged the music for Sondheim's television muscial "Evening Primrose", and who wrote the theme song for the television game show "I've Got a Secret".
Her best-remembered role is "Miss Hannigan" in Annie, for which she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in 1977.
She was widowed in 1977, and appeared as a recently widowed woman in Ballroom in 1979. Her performance of the song "Fifty Percent" from Ballroom on the Tony Awards was one of a series of triumphant performances on the yearly awards show, which included an outrageous version of "Broadway Baby" from Follies. Her version of Gershwin's "Vodka" had her throwing off a luxurious fur, (telling it to "wait in the car") to reveal a spectacular sleek blue sequined costume, adding "I am too good for this room. I am too good for this song! I am, however, not too good for this dress."
Her television series, Dorothy, in 1979, had her portraying a former showgirl teaching music and drama at a stuffy Girls' School.
She took over as Mrs. Lovett in Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, and co-starred with Katharine Hepburn in the play West Side Waltz in 1981.
Her (non-musical) performance as a washed-up television comedienne in 1983's Noises Off received rave reviews, but the role was played by Carol Burnett in the movie.
She appeared in two films, playing an agent in Garbo Talks and an eccentric in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
She died in New York of cancer.
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