WIKIPEDIA: Eve Arden (April 30, 1908 – November 12, 1990) was an Academy Award-nominated and Emmy-winning American actress. Her almost 60-year career crossed most media frontiers with supporting and leading roles, but she is perhaps best remembered for playing the sardonic but engaging high school teacher in the classic Our Miss Brooks (radio and television), and as the Rydell High School principal in the films Grease and Grease 2.
Arden's quick wit made her a natural talent for radio; she became a regular on Danny Kaye's short-lived but memorably zany comedy-variety show in 1946, which also featured swing bandleader Harry James and gravel-voiced character actor-comedian Lionel Stander.
Kaye's show lasted one season, but Arden's display of comic talent and timing set the stage for her to be cast in her most well-known role, Madison High School English teacher Connie Brooks in Our Miss Brooks. Arden portrayed the character on radio from 1948 to 1957, in a television version of the program from 1952 to 1956, and in a 1956 feature film. Arden's character clashed with the school's principal, Osgood Conklin (played by Gale Gordon), and nursed an unrequited crush on fellow teacher Philip Boynton (played originally by future film star Jeff Chandler and later in the series by Robert Rockwell).
Arden's portrayal of the character was so popular that she was made an honorary member of the National Education Association, received a 1952 award from the Teachers College of Connecticut's Alumni Association "for humanizing the American teacher," and even received teaching job offers.
Arden won a radio listeners' poll by Radio Mirror magazine as the top ranking comedienne of 1948-1949, receiving her award at the end of an Our Miss Brooks broadcast that March. "I'm certainly going to try in the coming months to merit the honor you've bestowed upon me, because I understand that if I win this (award) two years in a row, I get to keep Mr. Boynton," she joked. But she was also a hit with the critics; a winter 1949 poll of newspaper and magazine radio editors taken by Motion Picture Daily named her the year's best radio comedienne.
Arden had an approximately 30 second guest role in a 1955 I Love Lucy episode entitled "L.A. at Last" in which she played herself. While awaiting their food at The Brown Derby, a Hollywood restaurant, Lucy (Lucille Ball) and Ethel (Vivian Vance) argue over whether a certain portrait on the wall of a Hollywood actress is of Shelly Winters or Judy Holliday. Ethel decides to ask a lady sitting in the booth next to them, who replies, "Neither. That's Eve Arden." Ethel suddenly realizes she'd just been talking to Arden herself, who is then treated to a pair of gawking eyes when she passes their table to leave the restaurant. This same episode also guest starred William Holden. Desilu Productions, jointly owned by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, was the production company for the Our Miss Brooks television show, which was filming during the same period as I Love Lucy. Ms. Ball and Ms. Arden became acquaintances when they co-starred together in Stage Door in 1937.
Arden tried another series in 1957, The Eve Arden Show, but it was cancelled after only a few episodes.
Arden also co-starred with Kaye Ballard in the 1967-1969 situation comedy The Mothers-in-Law, which was produced by her old friend Desi Arnaz after the dissolution of Desilu. A few years afterward, she made a new sitcom pilot co-starring Don Knotts, but it failed to attract a network buyer.
