What Happened to the Cast of ‘White Christmas’?

Bing Crosby as Bob Wallace

Bing Crosby’s Captain Bob Wallace is a former Broadway star who tours with Kaye’s Private Phil Davis after World War II. They end up organizing the Christmas show at the Pine Tree in Vermont, using it to honor General Waverly, who has come to own the inn.

White Christmas came ten years after Crosby had won an Oscar for 1944’s Going My Way. Though “White Christmas” became Crosby’s signature song, it was actually written for 1942’s Holiday Inn and became a chart topper for the first time then. The Guinness Book of World Records claims “White Christmas” is the best-selling single of all time. 

Crosby’s post-White Christmas films included Anything Goes, High Society, High Time, Robin and the 7 Hoods and Dr. Cook’s Garden. He began making TV appearances in 1954 and he hosted his first TV special, The Bing Crosby Show, that year. From 1958 on, he hosted about one or two TV specials per year. He starred in a one-season sitcom, The Bing Crosby Show, in 1964, and frequently guest-hosted The Hollywood Palace.

His yearly Christmas TV specials began at the start of the 1970s. He received the first Grammy Global Achievement Award in 1963. He’s one of 33 people to have three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, for motion pictures, radio and audio recording.

Crosby invested widely, including in broadcasting and production. He also owned 25 percent of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

“I guess I’ve sounded better in my time, but, all things considered, I’m in pretty good shape,” he said in 1975 about his continued singing. “When a singer reaches my age, he has to sing half a tone lower. Sinatra would sound better these days if he took his songs down a bit, but I guess he’s too proud. Who’s going to know?”

His last Christmas special, 1977’s Bing Crosby’s Merrie Olde Christmas featured a now-famous duet with David Bowie. It was taped that September, and aired weeks after Crosby’s death on Oct. 14 from a sudden heart attack. He was 74. 

Crosby had seven children. With his first wife, Dixie Lee, he welcomed four sons, Gary, twins Dennis and Phillip and Lindsay. Lee died in 1952 from ovarian cancer. With wife Kathryn Grant, who he married in 1957, he welcomed three children, Harry Lillis III, Mary and Nathaniel. Kathryn died in 2024. She was 90 years old.

Crosby, worried about spoiling his children, was famously strict. “He loved us as much as he possibly could,” Gary told PEOPLE after his death, “but he set up rules in a situation that he wasn’t familiar with. No one in his family had ever been famous before.” 

“What he said was law,” Dennis said, “and he didn’t have to say it twice.” Mary, his only daughter, told PEOPLE in 1978,  “When Daddy was alive, he wanted perfect children and he got them. But we’re basically normal kids — we have feelings, and we hurt and love. We’re not perfect, and that’s okay now. We don’t have to be anymore.”

Danny Kaye as Phil Davis

Danny Kaye starred in White Christmas as Private Phil Davis, the more cheerful member of the Wallace and Davis partnership.

In 1955, he starred in The Court Jester. That same year, he received an honorary Oscar. He received a Golden Globe nomination for 1958’s Me and the Colonel. He also starred in 1958’s Merry Andrew and 1959’s The Five Pennies. Like Crosby, he also had three stars on the Walk of Fame. 

In 1940, he married lyricist and composer Sylvia Fine, who wrote much of his material, including the patter songs he was most famous for. “It’s hard living in somebody’s shadow,” she told PEOPLE in 1979. “Someone will say: ‘As Danny Kaye said’ and I’ll know it’s from a number of mine.’ ” They had one daughter, Dena. 

The same year that White Christmas was released, Kaye became an ambassador for UNICEF, a cause he dedicated much of the rest of his life to. He was also a pilot, and often flew the plane to attend his fundraising stops. In 1986, he was named a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor for his work with the organization. In 1987, he posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Kaye had quadruple bypass heart surgery in 1983 and contracted hepatitis C from a blood transfusion. He died in 1987 at the age of 76. Sylvia died in 1991 at the age of 78.

Rosemary Clooney as Betty Haynes

Rosemary Clooney played Betty Haynes, the more level-headed of the two sisters.

Rosemary — the aunt of actor George Clooney — had found fame as a singer. White Christmas was her last major film role. In 1956, she began her own variety series, The Rosemary Clooney Show, and then starred in The Lux Show Starring Rosemary Clooney. She also appeared on Crosby’s TV shows, and the two co-hosted a radio show on weekdays in 1960.

In 1953, she married José Ferrer, an actor and director. They welcomed five children: Miguel (who became an actor), Rafael, Maria, Monsita and Gabriel. They divorced in 1961 because of Ferrer’s infidelity, but remarried in 1964. They divorced again in 1967.

Clooney was on the scene when her friend Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968. In the time that followed, her mental health suffered, and while she received treatment, she struggled to find joy in performing. “The more removed I became from my feelings, the less I sang well,” she told PEOPLE in 1982. “There are some records I made with Frank Sinatra then that I hate. I knew they were bad when I was making them, but there was nothing I could do about it. I could not sing any better than I was singing.”

When she did decide to give singing her all again, she struggled to gain a foothold. “A lot of damage was done in a short period, and it’s terrifically hard to undo it,” she said in 1982. “There were rumors of alcoholism, of pill addiction — they were right on that one — even that I had a fatal disease. People who had hired me before no longer wanted me.”

She began performing again in 1972. In 1976, she joined Bing Crosby on his 50th anniversary tour, which helped her relaunch her career. She signed a recording contract to sing jazz songs. 

Beginning in 1977, she toured in a show called 4 Girls 4 with other women singers. “We were never told in the ’50s that the people we were going to have the most fun working with would be other women. You were trained to think that women would be out for your job, and certainly your man,” she said in 1982. In 1977, she released a memoir, This for Remembrance, and CBS adapted it into a 1982 TV film. She published a second memoir, Girl Singer: An Autobiography, in 1999. She married her longtime boyfriend Dante DiPaolo in 1997.

Clooney had a handful of TV roles in the ‘80s and ‘90s, including an Emmy-nominated role on George’s hit series E.R. When her nephew was named PEOPLE’s Sexiest Man Alive in 1997, she told us, “He always had a smart answer and a kind of skewed look at the world. I thought he’d probably be a comic.” 

In 2002, she received a lifetime achievement Grammy award. 

Rosemary died in 2002 from lung cancer. She was 74.

Vera-Ellen as Judy Haynes

Vera-Ellen, born Vera-Ellen Rohe, played Judy, the movie’s most stunning dancer. She had already shown off her dancing skills in Gene Kelly movies Words and Music and On the Town, as well as the 1953 Ethel Merman movie Call Me Madam.

After White Christmas, she starred in one more movie, 1957’s Let’s Be Happy. She appeared frequently on TV variety programs throughout the ‘50s, but by the ‘60s had retired from performing.

Vera-Ellen was married to dancer Robert Hightower from 1941 to 1946. From 1954 to 1966, she was married to oilman Victor Bennett Rothschild. They welcomed daughter Victoria Ellen in 1963. She died at three months old from SIDS. After their divorce, she lived in seclusion in the Hollywood Hills, per The New York Times.

Vera-Ellen died in 1981 from ovarian cancer. She was 60.

Dean Jagger as Major General Tom Waverly

Dean Jagger played Major General Tom Waverly, a beloved figure during the war who struggles to run his Vermont Inn. Jagger was an Oscar winner for 1949’s Twelve O’Clock High.

Jagger was a character actor who had over 100 credits to his name. After White Christmas, he appeared widely in films throughout the ‘50s, including 1956’s Three Brave Men, 1957’s Forty Guns, 1958’s King Creole (where he played the father of Elvis Presley’s character) and 1959’s The Nun’s Story (where he played the father of Audrey Hepburn’s character). He also appeared on TV, and in the 1960s he increased his TV appearances, with shows including The Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

From 1963 to 1965, he starred in the TV series Mr. Novak, for which he received two Emmy nominations. He played a high school principal and received two Emmy nominations. 

Other TV appearances included The Partridge Family, The F.B.I., The Fugitive, Bonanza and Alias Smith and Jones. He also had roles in movies like 1973’s The Stranger and 1977’s End of the World. He won a Daytime Emmy for a guest role on This Is the Life and his last TV role was on a 1985 episode of St. Elsewhere.   

Jagger was married three times: to Antoinette Lowrance from 1935 to 1943; to Gloria Ling from 1947 to 1967; and to Etta Mae Norton from 1968 until his death in 1991. He was 87 years old.

Mary Wickes as Emma Allen

Mary Wickes played Emma Allen, the slightly nosy housekeeper of the inn. She often played characters like nurses, nuns, secretaries and housekeepers. Other movies she appeared in included 1962’s The Music Man and 1965’s How to Murder Your Wife. Wickes was a live-action reference model for Cruella De Vil in 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians. 

Wickes was also a long-time friend of Lucille Ball and often made guest appearances on her TV series. Other shows she appeared on included M*A*S*H, Columbo, The Love Boat and Murder, She Wrote. She appeared on Broadway in 1979 in a revival of Oklahoma! as Aunt Eller.

Wickes appeared in 1990’s Postcards from the Edge as the grandmother of Shirley MacLaine’s character. Some of her final film roles included the role as Sister Mary Lazarus in the two Sister Act films and as Aunt March in 1994’s Little Women. 

She died in 1995 at the age of 85. She had one posthumous film role, as a gargoyle in Disney’s 1996 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame. She never married and had no children.

Anne Whitfield as Susan Waverly

Anne Whitfield played Susan Waverly, the general’s granddaughter. She was 15 at the time. 

Most of her acting career was on television, including roles in Manhunt, The Untouchables, Rawhide, The Donna Reed Show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Six Million Dollar Man and Emergency!

In the 1970s, she left Hollywood and moved to Olympia, Washington. She earned a bachelor’s at Evergreen State College and worked at the Department of Ecology for the State of Washington. In the 2000s, she opened a bed and breakfast. 

She was married twice: to Frederick Roy Schiller from 1958 to 1969 and to John F. Phillips from 1976 to 2008. She had three children. 

Whitfield died in 2024 at the age of 85. 

John Brascia as John, Judy Haynes’ dance partner

John Brascia was the main dance partner for Vera-Ellen’s Judy. He also had a featured dancing role in 1956’s Meet Me in Las Vegas.

In 1958, he married Tybee Arfa, his dance partner. They toured under the name Brascia and Tybee and were a common opening act. 

He appeared in other movies, including 1967’s The Ambushers, 1973’s Walking Tall, 1974’s Pray for the Wildcats and 1980’s The Baltimore Bullet. 

Brascia and Arfa divorced. He married Sondra Scott, with who he had a daughter. They also divorced. In 1986, he married Jordan Michaels. They also welcomed a daughter. 

Brascia died in 2013 at age 80.