Hope Elise Ross Lange (November 28, 1933 – December 19, 2003) was an Academy Award-nominated American stage, film, and television actress.
Lange was born into a theatrical family in Redding Ridge, Connecticut. Her father, John George Lange, was a musician and the music arranger for Florenz Ziegfeld and conductor for Henry Cohen. Her mother, Minnette (née Buddecke), was an actress before becoming a restaurant owner. Following her father’s passing, she worked as a waitress in her mother’s Greenwich Village restaurant. She sometimes walked the dog of former First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, who had a nearby apartment. When her photo appeared in the newspaper, she received an offer to work as a New York City advertising model.
In 1943, Lange made her Broadway debut in The Patriots. She began working in television in the 1950s, and came to prominence in her first film role, in Bus Stop with Marilyn Monroe and Don Murray, whom she married on April 14, 1956. As a result of favorable reviews, she landed a major role in the then-risqué 1957 film, Peyton Place. Her strong performance earned her a nomination for a Golden Globe Award and another for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She starred from 1968 to 1970 in the popular TV series, The Ghost & Mrs. Muir for which she earned two Emmy Awards and a Golden Globe Award nomination. This success was followed by three seasons on The New Dick Van Dyke Show. In 1977, she returned to the Broadway stage where her acting career had originally begun. She also played the wife of Charles Bronson in the original Death Wish.
Divorced from Don Murray in 1961, she left acting after her October 19, 1963 marriage to producer-director Alan J. Pakula, whom she divorced in 1971. In 1986, she married theatrical producer Charles Hollerith, with whom she remained the rest of her life. She died on December 19, 2003, at St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, California, as a result of an ischemic colitis infection at the age of 70.
Lange had two children with Don Murray: actor Christopher Murray and photographer Patricia Murray.
In 1972, she also dated Frank Sinatra. She also had a long-term relationship with actor Glenn Ford, her co-star in 1961's Pocketful of Miracles, but they never married.
