Long before the cascading red curls, the unmistakable voice and the standing ovations, she was a little girl from Queens named Bernadette Lazzara.

Her father delivered bread for a living. Her mother, convinced that her daughter possessed something extraordinary, began taking her to auditions almost as soon as she could speak. By the age of three, the child was appearing on television. At nine, she joined Actors’ Equity and adopted a new surname—partly to escape the ethnic stereotyping that could limit an Italian-American performer in the 1950s.

It was an early lesson in transformation: talent might open the door, but survival in show business required becoming whatever the industry was prepared to see.

She spent much of her childhood working. While other girls were discovering who they wanted to be, she was tap-dancing, acting and learning how to command an audience. Yet she never became merely a polished child star. Something stranger and more emotionally complicated emerged—a performer who could appear delicate and glamorous while communicating longing, anxiety and loneliness beneath the surface.

Her breakthrough arrived in the late 1960s with the nostalgic musical Dames at Sea. Audiences immediately noticed the petite actress with the enormous presence. Broadway soon followed, along with acclaimed performances in George M! and Mack and Mabel.

The latter musical was not initially a commercial triumph, but its score gave her material that seemed written for the peculiar ache in her voice. She could sing about love without making it sound safe. Even her brightest notes appeared to contain the knowledge that happiness might disappear.

Hollywood came calling. She appeared in Mel Brooks’s Silent Movie, played a resourceful orphanage worker in Annie and earned a Golden Globe for Pennies from Heaven. But her most famous early film role paired her with a comedian who was rapidly becoming one of America’s biggest stars.

They had already fallen in love off-screen.

Her relationship with Steve Martin lasted approximately four years. Together they made The Jerk, in which she played the sweetly eccentric Marie opposite his spectacularly naïve Navin Johnson. Their chemistry gave the absurd comedy an unexpectedly tender center.

For a time, they appeared ideally matched: two intelligent, highly disciplined performers whose public eccentricity concealed intensely private personalities. But the relationship ended in the early 1980s. Neither turned the breakup into a public spectacle, and both largely protected the details of what had passed between them.

Her greatest artistic partnership was still ahead.

Composer Stephen Sondheim recognized that her unusual voice could do more than deliver a melody. It could expose the conflicting thoughts hidden inside a character. In Sunday in the Park with George, she originated the role of Dot, the frustrated lover and artistic muse standing beside a painter who could reproduce her image but could not fully give himself to her.

Her performance of “Move On” became one of musical theatre’s defining expressions of love, sacrifice and artistic courage.

A few years later, she originated the Witch in Into the Woods. The role allowed her to be frightening, funny, maternal and devastated—sometimes within the same scene. Through Sondheim’s songs, she explored the consequences of wishes coming true and the painful discovery that children cannot be protected forever.

She would become one of his foremost interpreters, returning repeatedly to his work in concerts and productions including A Little Night Music, Follies and, decades later, Old Friends. After his death in 2021, she spoke of dreaming about him and feeling his absence whenever she sang the music that had bound their lives together.

Her Broadway achievements extended well beyond Sondheim. She won her first Tony Award for Song and Dance, carrying much of the show alone. Her second came for playing Annie Oakley in Annie Get Your Gun. Later, her fiercely vulnerable portrayal of stage mother Rose in Gypsy challenged expectations about how the legendary character should look and behave.

Away from the stage, she eventually found a quieter love with investment adviser Michael Wittenberg. They married in 1996 and guarded their life together from the relentless curiosity that surrounds celebrity marriages.

Then, in September 2005, tragedy arrived without warning.

Wittenberg was traveling on business in Montenegro when the helicopter carrying him crashed. He was only 43. Their marriage had lasted nine years.

The actress rarely turned her grief into publicity. Instead, she continued working and devoted increasing energy to another cause close to her heart: abandoned animals. With her friend Mary Tyler Moore, she co-founded Broadway Barks in 1998, an annual adoption event bringing theatre performers together with animal shelters and rescue organizations.

She also wrote children’s books inspired by her dogs, directing proceeds toward animal welfare. Her humanitarian work eventually earned her the Tony Awards’ Isabelle Stevenson Award.

Well into her seventies, she continued stepping onto major stages with the same combination of fragility and command that had defined her career. The little girl whose surname was changed to help her fit into show business ultimately became someone the theatre world could never mistake for anybody else.

The child performer, Sondheim muse, Tony-winning Broadway legend, former partner of Steve Martin and widow who turned private loss into compassion for vulnerable animals is Bernadette Peters.