Goodbye to Edie Adams

Edie Adams, the lovely blonde who purred her way through those old commercials for Muriel Cigars ("Why don't you pick one up and smoke it sometime?") and starred on TV, Broadway and in classic movies has died at age 81.

Besides the sultry cigar commercials dimly remembered from my youth (I knew she was sexy -- I just wasn't sure what sexy was), I'll always remember Adams in her role as the most recently cast-off secretary/mistress of bad boss Fred MacMurray in Billy Wilder's brilliant The Apartment and as Sid Caesar's wife in the zany It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Widow of wildly popular TV comedian Ernie Kovacs, she also won a Tony for playing the role of Daisy Mae in the Broadway version of Li'l Abner.

The actress in Beverly Hills in 2005/Getty Images