By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS JUNE 15, 2016
Ann Morgan Guilbert, the actress best known for playing the next-door neighbor Millie Helper on "The Dick Van Dyke Show" in the 1960s, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. She was 87.
The cause was cancer, her daughter Nora Eckstein said.
On "The Dick Van Dyke Show," one of the most acclaimed comedies in television history, Ms. Guilbert was the perky pal of Laura Petrie, played by Mary Tyler Moore, and the wife of Jerry Helper, a dentist, played by Jerry Paris.
In the 1990s she was a regular on the sitcom "The Nanny," on which she played Fran Drescher's feisty grandmother, Yetta.
She was in Nicole Holofcener's 2010 movie "Please Give," a Sundance Film Festival selection, and on the HBO series "Getting On." Most recently she appeared on the CBS comedy "Life in Pieces."
She had extensive theater credits, including productions of "The Matchmaker," "Arsenic and Old Lace," "Waiting for Godot," "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "Harvey." In 2005 she appeared on Broadway in the comedy "A Naked Girl on the Appian Way," which starred Jill Clayburgh and Richard Thomas.
Ms. Guilbert began her career in a musical variety act created by the composer Billy Barnes, which toured throughout California.
In 1959, "The Billy Barnes Revue" opened in New York at an Off Broadway theater and then moved to Broadway. One of its fans was the actor, writer and producer Carl Reiner, who remembered Ms. Guilbert when he was assembling the cast for "The Dick Van Dyke Show."