NEW YORK — Shannon Bolin, an actress and singer best remembered as Meg Boyd — the loyal and heartsick wife who was left behind in the original Broadway production of “Damn Yankees” as well as the subsequent movie adaptation — died March 25 in Manhattan. She was 99.
Her death was confirmed by a nephew, John Link.
Ms. Bolin came east to be a singer from her small South Dakota hometown when she was 20. Her first stop was Washington, where she worked for CBS Radio and sang in a church choir that performed for President Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. A mezzo-soprano, she auditioned in 1944 in New York for the New Opera Company and won a place in the ensemble — using the stage name Anne Bolyn — in the troupe’s Broadway production of “Helen Goes to Troy” with music by Jacques Offenbach.
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Ms. Bolin married pianist and composer Milton Kaye in 1946, and in her private life she was known as Shannon Bolin Kaye. She worked for a time with the composer Marc Blitzstein on “Regina,” his operatic treatment of the Lillian Hellman drama “The Little Foxes,” though when the show ran briefly on Broadway in 1949, the title role went to Jane Pickens. In 1954, she was in “The Golden Apple,” a through-composed musical that reset the Homeric epics in Washington state in the early 20th century.
In 1955, she was cast by the director George Abbott in “Damn Yankees,” a signature musical of the decade, based on “The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant,” Douglass Wallop’s novel about an ardent baseball fan who sells his soul to the devil to help his beloved Washington Senators defeat the hated Yanks.
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Transformed from Joe Boyd, a middle-aged husband, to Joe Hardy, an athletic young slugger, he leaves Meg to wonder if he’s ever going to return — though he misses her enough that as Joe Hardy he takes a room as a boarder in his old home. In one of the show’s memorable moments, the two sing a duet about their shared unhappiness, “A Man Doesn’t Know.”
In a 2008 interview with Theatermania, Ms. Bolin recalled that she had a hand in creating that number. Jerry Ross, who wrote the words and music with Richard Adler, “wanted to add some recitative between Joe’s section and mine,” she said, “so he said to me, ‘Shannon, what would you say at a moment like that?’ And I told him, ‘I’d say something like, ‘I know what you mean, Joe, only too well, because I’m lonely just like you are.’ And he wound up putting that in.”
Nearly the whole cast was in the movie version, also directed by Abbott, but the movie heartthrob Tab Hunter replaced Stephen Douglass as Joe Hardy. He and Bolin became lifelong friends. She appeared in the 2015 documentary “Tab Hunter Confidential.”
Ms. Bolin received perhaps the best reviews of her career for her comic performance as a caricature of a crone in 1969 in “Promenade,” an experimental, allegorical off-Broadway musical about a pair of prisoners who escape into a corrupt world, with music by Al Carmines and a book by María Irene Fornés. Kevin Kelly of The Boston Globe called it “one of the best performances currently on or off Broadway.”
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Ione Shannon Bolin was born in Spencer, S.D., a town of 500, on Jan. 1, 1917, to Harry Bolin, a hotel owner who raised horses during the Depression, and the former Grace Elsie.
“My father named me Ione because I was born on the first of January, which is 1-1, or 1-one,” she said in 2006. “That’s South Dakota humor for you.”
After high school, she attended Dakota Wesleyan University and later, while she was living in Washington, the University of Maryland.
Milton Kaye died in 2006. Ms. Bolin leaves a sister, Virginia Link.
In 1941, Ms. Bolin began singing on CBS Radio in Washington, and during World War II she became the host of her own musical program, interviewing soldiers and singing. As she recalled in 2008, it was pluck, good fortune, and the serendipitous intervention of a star that set her on her way.
“I just walked up to CBS and asked for a job as a singer,” she said. “I thought you could do that. A telephone operator who looked just like Lily Tomlin told me, ‘We don’t need singers.’ But out came this redheaded guy who’d heard me, and he said, ‘Can you read poetry, too?’
“Of course I told him I could do anything. He told me that a lady was leaving, and they needed a replacement. He was Arthur Godfrey.”