Paid Notice: Deaths
Published: January 4, 2007
SAVAGE--Elizabeth, 93, died on November 9, 2006 at the Actors Home in Englewood, NJ, but she was a quintessential New Yorker whose spiritual home remained the streets of Manhattan. The only child of her Shakespearean actor father, C. McLean Savage and mother, Grace Hanna, she'd helped to support the family during the Great Depression by dancing, and during the long subway rides home each night after the clubs had closed, she studied the classics and reveled in the journeys of the mind. Liz went on to dance with Michael Mikhail Mordkin, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet and with Harriet Horne, frequently backing such headliners as Frank Sinatra at the Paramount Theater. Later, encouraged by her husband, Nathan Gross, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, she became a script supervisor and an officer of Local 161, IATSE, where, together with Barbara Robinson, she became first trustee of its Pension & Welfare Fund. Survived only by her late husband's nephews, Stephen and Harold Gross, and a few close friends, the gifts that she leaves are, appropriately, gifts of the spirit. Liz was a rare human being whose lifelong commitment to humanity, through political and social activism, means that she will be missed by those who knew her and those who did not.