Kathryn Crosby, spirited Paramount starlet who caused a stir by marrying the much older Bing Crosby

‘He invited me for a cup of tea… I looked into his big blue eyes and about 15 minutes later, I realised I was in love’

Kathryn Crosby, who has died aged 90, was an actress and singer who excited considerable tabloid curiosity in 1957 upon marrying Bing Crosby, then 30 years her senior.
At the time, she was emerging as a pertly petite presence in superior indie and studio ventures, billed as Kathryn Grant. She pulled focus from Kim Novak in the casino heist movie 5 Against the House (1955) and was delightful dodging Ray Harryhausen effects as Princess Parisa in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), while her especially hostile witness proved central to Anatomy of a Murder (1959).
Yet this promising career was paused as the new Mrs Bing settled into Crosby family life. The pair had met on the Paramount lot while the crooner was filming White Christmas (1954). “I had a horsehair petticoat on… carrying some things to the drama department,” she recalled. “And I heard a voice behind me, it said, ‘Hi Tex, what’s your hurry?’ And I stopped dead. It was Bing Crosby.”
She fell rapidly – “He invited me for a cup of tea… I looked into his big blue eyes and about 15 minutes later, I realised I was in love” – but the courtship lasted several years. By this point, Bing was in his fifties, a survivor of a turbulent first marriage to nightclub singer Dixie Lee, and a notably cavalier womaniser: one of his flings, the actress Inger Stevens, only learnt she had been jilted upon watching a news report about the Grant-Crosby nuptials.
His new bride entertained few illusions: “[Bing] was a pretty cute kid when it came to convincing a girl that what she really wanted was to stay home and scrub floors. He didn’t know that he was a male chauvinist pig, but he was!”
Diverse lifestyles posed a further challenge: “He was an insomniac. He slept for hours. And then he woke up and read all night until about six [am]… Well, I got up at six, so I upset him, which was too bad for him.”
The marriage endured nevertheless, with Crosby sporadically guesting on her husband’s TV specials. Bing returned the favour, appearing on San Francisco network KPIX-TV’s The Kathryn Crosby Show.
They remained inseparable until Bing succumbed to a fatal heart attack after playing golf in October 1977: “He went out on top of his game. He was wonderful and he was with friends and doing what he loved.”
Olive Kathryn Grandstaff was born in Houston, Texas, on November 25 1933, one of five children to county commissioner Delbert Grandstaff Sr and his wife Olive, née Stokely, a music teacher.
A child actor, she drew even more attention competing on the teen beauty-pageant circuit. After one judge suggested she try for movie roles, Grant and her mother flew to Hollywood: “Monday, we went to Paramount. On Wednesday, I tested with Bill Holden. And on Friday, I signed a seven-year contract.”
The newly renamed Kathryn Grant made an uncredited screen debut as a showgirl in the biopic So This Is Love (1953); she was also spied, through Jimmy Stewart’s binoculars, around the songwriter’s piano in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954).
For some while, she combined acting with studying, graduating with a fine arts degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1955; after marrying, she retrained in LA as a nurse.
As the unofficial keeper of the Bing flame, she oversaw the annual Crosby Golf Tournament in North Carolina; she also penned two memoirs, 1967’s Bing and Other Things and 1983’s My Life with Bing.
In the press, she defended her husband against claims of physical abuse made by his oldest son Gary in his own 1983 memoir Going My Own Way: “From the time I met Bing, he never touched his boys. And Gary just told stories that were… They got a good audience.”
She resumed acting after Crosby’s death, appearing in Broadway’s 1996 revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s State Fair. In 2000, she married Maurice William Sullivan, a teacher who had homeschooled the Crosbys’ children; 10 years later, Sullivan died in a car crash in which Crosby was badly injured.
Her final big-screen role came with Henry Jaglom’s showbiz drama Queen of the Lot (2010), although she subsequently appeared in documentaries celebrating Bing’s life and work.
In Richard Grudens’s 2003 biography Bing Crosby: Crooner of the Century, she revisited her first marriage with obvious affection: “I’m glad I married an older man… When I married Bing […] his character was set. In other words, I knew what I was getting. With a younger man, you can’t tell how he will develop.”
Her two sons and daughter by Bing Crosby survive her.
Kathryn Crosby, born November 25 1933, died September 20 2024