Celebrity

‘Mission Impossible’ Star and Music Legend’s Ex Dies at 91

ICONIC COUPLE

The couple faced racial hatred in 1960s America.

Sammy Davis Jr. (1925-1990) with his future wife, the actress May Britt.
Hulton Deutsch/Corbis via Getty Images

Mission: Impossible actor May Britt has died at the age of 91, 65 years on from her marriage to entertainment icon Sammy Davis Jr. She died of natural causes in Los Angeles, at the Providence Cedars-Sinai Tarzana Medical Center on Dec. 11, her son Mark Davis said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The Swedish-born Britt signed with 20th Century Fox in 1957 and featured in The Hunters, The Blue Angel, and Murder, Inc., before Rat Pack icon Davis announced they were engaged in 1960. They had one child together, Tracey, who died in 2020 at the age of 59 from a short illness, and adopted two sons, Mark and Jeff. In her 2014 book Sammy Davis: A Personal Journey With My Father, Tracey said Davis broke off his engagement to Canadian dancer Joan Stuart to be with Britt. They married in Los Angeles that year, with Frank Sinatra as best man, but Fox later dropped Britt after her interracial marriage, while the couple received death threats and were uninvited from a reception at John F. Kennedy’s White House. Although Britt and Davis divorced in 1968, Tracey said their love never faded. Asking Davis what happened, he told her, “I just couldn’t be what she wanted to me to be. A family man. My performance schedule was rigorous.” Britt remarried in 1993 to Lennart Ringquist, who died in 2017.

Read it at The Hollywood Reporter