Andrea Marcovicci, a well-known celebrity with Romanian heritage in New York, is fundraising for COVID-19 Emergency Relief run by The Actors Fund. In celebration of Valentine’s Day 2021, Andrea Marcovicci, a well-known celebrity, will present „A Kern Valentine” on Sunday, February 14th, 6:30pm CST.
Andrea Marcovicci was born in Manhattan, to Helen Stuart, a singer, and Eugen Marcovicci, a physician and internist of Romanian descent. People always think I’m: Italian. Nobody knows I’m: Not Italian! My father was born in Transylvania. I’m actually Romanian, she once responded to the Chicago Tribune.
Andrea’s father was Romanian, and lived in Vienna, Austria, before moving to the U.S. Her mother was born in Pennsylvania, to Slovak parents. Andrea has a daughter with her former husband, actor Daniel Reichert. Her father was 63 when she was born and died when she was 20. In her teens she decided that she wanted to be a singer, but instead majored in drama. In a 1972 interview, she looked back at this period without enthusiasm:
“I found that people interested in theater were very serious and heavy. It was a very inbred group. I could not be a part of that. So, if I was going to be an actress, I would have to sing my way into it. I guess what I didn’t like about theater on the academic level was the feeling of always being defeated. How could any 18-year-old girl be expected to play Amanda in The Glass Menagerie? You just couldn’t be successful at what you were doing. And although I might not have then been able to articulate this, I must have sensed it at the time”.
Marcovicci left school and started making her way into show business as a singer, appearing on The Mike Douglas Show and The Merv Griffin Show. As an actress, she debuted in commercials and soon became better known as Dr. Betsy Chernak Taylor on the television soap opera Love is a Many Splendored Thing from 1970–1973. She appeared in the second pilot film for the television series Harry O, titled Smile Jenny, You’re Dead. She was nominated for a Golden Globe award for the New Star of the Year in 1977 for the film, The Front (1976).
Considering that Marcovicci has spent most of her professional life exploring such themes through music, perhaps it was inevitable that she would bring her thoughts on these events to the stage. Marcovicci’s aptly named new show, „Crossing Time,” had its Chicago premiere engagement on North Milwaukee Avenue in 2018.
The link between mother and daughter runs particularly deep, for she believes that, in large part, she owes her art to her mother’s work. Helen Marcovicci’s impact on her daughter’s music „is vast,” says Andrea Marcovicci. „Growing up, listening to her sing was very powerful. She took me to her singing lessons — at Carnegie Hall, of all places, which was very exciting. I remember going up those staircases and listening to her vocalize.” More specifically, Helen Marcovicci’s repertoire shaped Andrea Marcovicci’s career as interpreter and archivist of songs that otherwise might have slipped into oblivion.
A champion of the American Popular Songbook, her recordings reflect her deep devotion not only to classic songwriters of the past (like Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, and Rodgers & Hart) but her encouragement of new voices composing in that same tradition.
Her film debut in The Front brought her a Golden Globe nomination. She’s played Broadway, the White House, sold out Carnegie Hall, and ushered in the millennium with the Chicago Symphony. She has created full-cast variety shows, and over forty solo cabaret shows. Ten Cents a Dance, her tribute to Ruth Etting, aired on PBS. Andrea has guest starred on the celebrated Prairie Home Companion and read poetry, and stories, for NPR.
Her many awards and honors include a MAC, BISTRO, and MABEL. Andrea was inducted into The Cabaret Hall of Fame in 2016. She holds the record – an unprecedented 25 seasons – at the legendary Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel, and was the final performer ever to grace that stage.