During the Great Depression, her mother converted their home into a boarding house, which Fabray and her siblings helped to run, and her main job was ironing clothes.

[5] At the age of 19, Fabray made her feature-film debut as one of Bette Davis's ladies-in-waiting in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939).

She appeared in two additional films that year for Warner Bros., The Monroe Doctrine (short) and A Child Is Born, but was not signed to a long-term studio contract.

During the show's New York run, Fabray was invited to perform the "Caro nome" number for a benefit at Madison Square Garden with Eleanor Roosevelt as the main speaker.

[6] Artur Rodziński, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, saw Fabray's performance in Meet the People and offered to sponsor operatic vocal training for her at the Juilliard School.

She studied opera at Juilliard with Lucia Dunham in 1941 while performing in her first Broadway musical, Cole Porter's Let's Face It!, with Danny Kaye and Eve Arden.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, she made her first high-profile national television appearances performing on a number of variety programs such as The Ed Sullivan Show, Texaco Star Theatre and The Arthur Murray Party.

[8] In December 1956, she appeared in an episode of Playhouse 90 titled "The Family Nobody Wanted" alongside Lew Ayres and Tim Hovey.

During the PBS program Pioneers of Television: Sitcoms, Mary Tyler Moore credited Fabray with inspiring her trademark comedic crying technique.

[citation needed] Fabray's final work occurred in 2007 when she appeared in The Damsel Dialogues, a musical revue at the Whitefire Theatre in Sherman Oaks, California.

[10] According to Fabray, their marriage ended in divorce partially because of her depression, anxiety and insecurity related to her worsening hearing loss.

[13] In 1978, during the filming of Harper Valley PTA, Fabray suffered a second major concussion after falling, hitting her neck on the sidewalk and the back of her head on a rock.

Fabray developed associated memory loss and visual issues such as nystagmus but had to finish her scenes, including one involving a car chase.

She even contributed the story line to an entire 1982 episode[citation needed] of One Day at a Time, which focused on hearing loss awareness and acceptance, treatment options, and sign language.

[16] In 2001, she wrote to advice columnist Dear Abby to decry the loud background music played on television programs.

[17] A founding member of the National Captioning Institute,[1] she also was one of the first big names[18] to bring awareness to the need for media closed-captioning.

[20] She focused her later years on campaigning for widows' rights, particularly pertaining to women's inheritance laws, taxes, and asset protection.

She won a Golden Apple award from the Hollywood Women's Press Club in 1960 along with Janet Leigh for being a Most Cooperative actress.