earned her the nickname of "Busy Bea" from members of the press. The Pantagraph columnist Ernie Kreiling remarked in 1965 that "probably no Hollywood personality has spent as many hours in our homes". Benaderet was good friends and a frequent collaborator with Mel Blanc, who wrote in his 1988 biography That's Not All Folks!: "[We] spent so much time together in studios that I used to refer jokingly to her as the 'other woman' in my life." Keeping the spelling of her surname, which has been misspelled as Benederet or Benadaret, was a choice she had to make. She first resisted requests to change it early in her radio career: "[T]hey'd say, 'Anything's better than Benaderet—How about Smith?'" When she was introduced to Orson Welles in 1936, he remarked that her name "sounded like something you ad lib in a mob scene." It was misspelled in a 1946 press release created specifically about its proper spelling, and Radio Life wrote in 1947: "If someone were to conduct a survey to decide the radio personality with the most frequently misspelled name, Bea Benaderet would probably win hands down." Early in the first season of The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show, her full name appeared as "Bee Benadaret" in the closing credits. See also List of comedians List of stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame Selected filmography Radio Shorts Little Red Riding Rabbit (1944) (voice) Bugs Bunny and the Three Bears (1944) (voice) Baseball Bugs (1946) (voice) Tweetie Pie (1947) (voice) Donald's Dream Voice (1948) (voice) Daddy Duck (1948) (voice) Chow Hound (1951) (voice) A Bear for Punishment (1951) (voice) Gift Wrapped (1952) (voice) Feed the Kitty (1952) (voice) Bewitched Bunny (1954) (voice) The Hole Idea (1955) (voice) Film Television Awards and honors Notes References Bibliography External links Partial article published in The Woman magazine, March 1968 TV Sidekicks: Bea Benaderet's Blanche to Gracie Allen's Gracie 1906 births 1968 deaths Actresses from San Francisco American people of Irish descent American people of Turkish-Jewish descent American radio actresses American television actresses Burials at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery Deaths from lung cancer in California Deaths from pneumonia in California Hanna-Barbera people Warner Bros. Cartoons voice actors 20th-century American actresses