Renée Orin Biography

Born Renée Orin in Slatington, PA, she grew up the youngest of five children. Raised by her mother and a father who owned a small scrap iron business, she grew up in a musical home. Her older sister Ruth played the piano and sang while her other sisters Naomi and Dotty were singers. As a teen, Renée begged her parents to let her take singing lessons. Her music teacher suggested that she work with an acting coach in New York, Claudia Frank. Determined to be in show business, Orin endured the two-and-a-half-hour train rides to New York. With the help of Frank’s coaching, she auditioned and was accepted into Carnegie Tech (now known as Carnegie Mellon.) She went on to play summer stock at Cleveland, OH’s Cain Park Theater each summer in the late ’40s. In 1948, the actress met composer/pianist Albert Hague. After a few years of being friends and supporters of each other’s careers, they were married around 1951. She appeared in over 400 performances of Hague’s first Brodaway musical Plain and Fancy. One song from the show, “Young and Foolish,’” became a standard, recorded by Eddie Fisher, Tony Bennett, Cedar Walton, and the McGuire Sisters, among others. Her husband later was a Tony Award winner and appeared as Professor Shorofsky in both the movie and TV versions of Fame. Her first Broadway show was the final national tour of Finian’s Rainbow. She went on to enjoy a singular career in many Broadway plays and musicals, including Neil Simon’s Plaza Suite, Tennessee Williams’ Slapstick Tragedy, and the Broadway revival of Pal Joey. She starred opposite Gene Kelly in Take Me Along, Jack Lemmon, Jack Gilford in Fiddler on the Roof, Paul Lynde, and many others. The couple went on to develop a cabaret act, Young and Foolish, which told the story of their lives in comedy and music. LML Music issued a 1997 recording of their act ,Still Young and Foolish. At the age of 73 after a long bout with lymphoma, Renée Orin Hague died in Los Angeles, CA, on August 26, 2000.