Selma Archerd, Actress and Widow of Variety Columnist Army Archerd, Dies at 98

Selma Archerd, the widow of longtime Variety columnist Army Archerd who recurred as a nurse on Melrose Place and appeared in the first Die Hard and in two Lethal Weapon movies, died Dec. 14, her family announced. She was 98.

Archerd played Mrs. Claus in Richard Donner’s Scrooged (1988), and she also showed up on the big screen in Arthur Hiller’s W.C. Fields and Me (1975), Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976), Fun With Dick and Jane (1977), Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977), Mommie Dearest (1981) and Indecent Proposal (1993).

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She has 51 credits listed on IMDb. The first one was for a 1973 episode of The Brady Bunch, and she would also work on the 1988 reunion telefilm A Very Brady Christmas and in The Brady Bunch Movie (1995).

Archerd, who lived in Westwood, portrayed Nurse Amy on 25 episodes of Fox’s Melrose Place from 1995-99 and was on other series produced by Aaron Spelling, including The Love Boat — where she and her husband played themselves on a 1987 installment — Hotel and Charmed.

The couple also appeared as one of the celebrity couples on the game show Tattletales from 1974-77.

Archerd was billed as a policewoman in Donner’s Lethal Weapon (1987) and Officer Selma in Lethal Weapon 3 (1992), and in between, she was one of the Nakatomi Corp. employees taken hostage in John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988).

One of two kids, Selma Helene Fenning was born on Feb. 26, 1925, in Newark, New Jersey. Her father, Harry, was a telegraph operator during World War I and then a furrier who brought the family west in the mid-1930s.

She attended UCLA and married Howard Rosenblum, who was in the military at the time, in June 1943. They divorced in October 1968, and she wed Army the following November, with their wedding rating a mention in Ed Sullivan’s “Little Old New York” society column in the New York Daily News.

The couple had first met at a party when she was 16, and he was 19.

Army Archerd started as a columnist for Variety in 1953 and was still with the publication when he died in September 2009 after a battle with mesothelioma at age 87.

“I am very proud of him, and I am very fierce about protecting the status of what he is,” Selma told the Los Angeles Times in 1999. “He isn’t the richest man in the world, or the most powerful … but what he has, I want respected. And I’ll take the title of pain in the ass so that he will be respected.”

Survivors include her sons from her first marriage, Richard and James, and her grandson, Ryan. Donations in her memory can be made to the Exceptional Children’s Foundation.

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