Elisabeth Fraser: Elisabeth Fraser, who has died aged 85, played Sgt Ernest G Bilko's long-suffering, everlasting fiancée, Sgt Joan Hogan, in the classic 1950s television series The Phil Silvers Show.
Although the fast-talking Bilko - brilliantly embodied by Silvers - was very fond of the plump, pretty blonde, he used her shamelessly. As secretary in the camp commander's office, she was able to give him an advantage over the rest of the camp, as he would be forewarned of new management schemes and could use this knowledge to dupe his victims.
Bilko also used all his wiles to avoid marrying Joan. In one episode, when he thinks that she is trying to trap him, he takes her to dinner at Sgt Sowici's place just to show her how bad marriage can be.
But, though tested to the limit, Joan, portrayed by Fraser with warmth and good humour, still retained an affection for her irrepressible beau, knowing, as we did, that he would never marry her.
Fraser's first appearance on the show was on October 4th, 1955, when she outwitted Bilko into getting a personal jeep, and she stayed until 1958. She bade her farewell in an episode when, after Bilko forgets St Valentine's Day, she leaves the army.
On realising what he has done, Bilko follows her and tries to get her to re-enlist. Although Fraser's fate was to be always recognised as "Ernie's Joanie", she appeared in more than 24 feature films, in many other television series and on Broadway.
Born Elisabeth Fraser Jonker in Brooklyn, she got her first professional role on Broadway aged 20, just six weeks out of high school, in the 1940 production of Robert E Sherwood's Pulitzer prize-winning play, There Shall Be No Night. It was about the 1939 Russian invasion of Finland, and she was cast with Montgomery Clift (eight years before his screen debut) as young lovers.
Fraser's role earned her a Warner Brothers contract, her first film being One Foot In Heaven (1941), starring Fredric March as a Methodist minister. She then played the daughter of the household disrupted by acerbic critic Sheridan Whiteside (Monty Woolley) in The Man Who Came To Dinner (1941), and a Norwegian resisting the Nazis in Commandos Strike At Dawn (1942).
A year later, she took part in Moss Hart's military extravaganza, Winged Victory, on Broadway. Among the huge cast was an exuberant young dancer, Ray McDonald, who had already made an impression alongside Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Babes On Broadway (1941). He and Fraser married in 1944.
While his career declined, hers prospered. Although she rarely had leading roles, Fraser got good supporting parts in two Arthur Miller adaptations, All My Sons (1948) and Death Of A Salesman (1951), and was a member of a hillbilly clan in Roseanna McCoy (1949). After her divorce from McDonald in 1952 (he died in 1959), she saw out her Warner Brothers contract in So Big (1953), with Jane Wyman, and was Doris Day's sister in Young At Heart (1954).
She was to make three further films with her friend Doris Day: The Tunnel Of Love (1958), in the role she played on Broadway the year before, as the child-bearing neighbour of a couple striving to have a child; The Glass-Bottomed Boat (1966); and The Ballad Of Josie (1967). Other films included A Patch Of Blue (1965), with Shelley Winters, and Tony Rome (1967), with Frank Sinatra.
Her second marriage, to screenwriter Charles Peck Jr, also ended in divorce; she leaves three daughters.
Elisabeth Fraser, born January 8th, 1920; died May 5th, 2005