![](https://staging.doyouremember.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/nanett.jpg)
Fabray later starred in a short-lived, 1961 situation comedy on NBC — “Westinghouse Playhouse starring Nanette Fabray and Wendell Corey” — in which she played a Broadway star whose new husband, a widower living in Beverly Hills, has two children.
![](https://staging.doyouremember.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/nanettefabray.jpg)
The series was created by Fabray’s second husband, screenwriter Ranald MacDougall. He died in 1973.
Fabray, who received a Tony nomination in 1963 for her performance in the musical comedy “Mr. President,” made numerous guest appearances on TV variety shows — as well as appearing regularly on game shows such as “Password” and “Hollywood Squares.”
![](https://staging.doyouremember.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/515417858.jpg)
She also played Mary Tyler Moore’s mother in two episodes of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” had a semi-regular role as Bonnie Franklin’s mother on “One Day at a Time” and played real-life niece Shelley Fabares’ mother on four episodes of “Coach.”
She also became an outspoken advocate for the hearing impaired.
![](https://staging.doyouremember.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/44de14ed5e9ab2113aff014f2981f77f-nanette-fabray-tv-guide.jpg)
Fabray, whose own undiagnosed hearing problem affected her grades in high school, was in her early 30s and appearing in a production of “Bloomer Girl” in Chicago when she found she no longer could hear the pit orchestra.
A doctor she found in the phone book predicted she’d lose her hearing in about five years.
![](https://staging.doyouremember.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/174241794.jpg)
She was diagnosed with otosclerosis, a disorder in which excessive growth in the bones of the middle ear interferes with the transmission of sound.
“If I’d known another person in the public eye who had a handicapping problem, it would have given me comfort. But I didn’t,” she told the Washington Post in 1984. “So I kept my problem to myself. My hearing kept going down.”
![](https://staging.doyouremember.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/920x920-3.jpg)
She said she became “so neurotically involved with my problem, so totally self-involved, so insecure,” that it destroyed her life with her first husband, David Tebet.
Fabray, who learned sign language, wore hearing aids until four operations between 1955 and 1977 restored her hearing.
![](https://staging.doyouremember.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/88ea4f9ca364dc6aebce6eb496c06cc1.jpg)
Over the years, she served on the boards of the National Council on Disability, the President’s Committee on Employment of People With Disabilities and the Better Hearing Institute, among others.