Seeking to earn extra income between theatrical gigs in the early 1950s, the British actress Anna Lee got a lucky break: As a novice in the advertising world, she was cast in a live television commercial for Lincoln automobiles on Ed Sullivan's Sunday-night variety show, "Toast of the Town."
Seated behind the wheel of an onstage facsimile, she extolled the car's virtues. Then, she recalled in her memoir, "in order to demonstrate its flexibility, I turned the wheel … and the entire mechanism came away in my hands! Too surprised to improvise, I sat and stared at the camera" for "interminable silent seconds."
"Needless to say," she went on, "Lincoln did not hire me again. Julia Meade became their spokeswoman."
What to Anna Lee was a wheel of misfortune turned out to be another lucky break - for Ms. Meade, a fledgling actress who was bereft of Broadway roles at the time.
Ms. Meade became a household name to Americans as a pitchwoman - as the elegant public face of Lincoln beginning in 1953 and as the promoter of a range of other products, including gas-powered appliances, Hudnut hair products, Life magazine and Kodak cameras.
"Lincoln made her a celebrity, if not a star, the object of intense viewer interest," Karal Ann Marling wrote in 1994 in her book "As Seen on TV: The Visual Culture of Everyday Life in the 1950s."
Ms. Meade died on Monday while watching television at her home in Manhattan, her daughter Caroline Rudd said. She was 90.