Frances Goffman Bay is a Canadian-born United States-based character actress known for playing a variety of quirky elderly women on film and television.
Bay was born in Mannville, Alberta and raised in Dauphin, Manitoba. Her younger brother was the noted sociologist Erving Goffman. Before World War II she acted professionally in Winnipeg and spent the war hosting the Canadian Broadcasting Company's radio show, "Everybody's Program", aimed at serv...
more
Frances Goffman Bay is a Canadian-born United States-based character actress known for playing a variety of quirky elderly women on film and television.
Bay was born in Mannville, Alberta and raised in Dauphin, Manitoba. Her younger brother was the noted sociologist Erving Goffman. Before World War II she acted professionally in Winnipeg and spent the war hosting the Canadian Broadcasting Company's radio show, "Everybody's Program", aimed at service members overseas.
She married businessman Charles (Chuck) Bay in 1934 and moved with him to New York City (where she studied with Uta Hagen), Boston and Los Angeles. Charles and Frances had one son, Josh, who died at the age of 23. Soon after the death of her husband in 2002, she was struck by a car in Glendale, California, and as a result she had to have part of her right leg amputated.
Bay was inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame on September 6, 2008, in large part thanks to a petition with 10,000 names that was submitted. She was...
less
