Biography

Gertrude Niesen was an American torch singer, actress, comedian, and songwriter who achieved popular success in musicals and films in the 1930s and 1940s. Niesen began singing as a career in the early 1930s, first appearing (credited as Gertrude Nissen) with Roger Wolfe Kahn and His Orchestra and Artie Shaw in a Vitaphone short film, Yacht Party. On old-time radio, Niesen was the featured singer on The Ex-Lax Big Show and host of The Show Shop, on NBC-Blue. She recorded for Victor, Columbia, and Brunswick in the 1930s, and in 1933 was the first to record the song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach. She appeared in the Broadway musical Calling All Stars in 1934 and in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1936.