'Brady Bunch' actress Ann B. Davis dies

SAN ANTONIO - Emmy-winning actress Ann B. Davis, 88, who became the country's favorite housekeeper as the devoted Alice of The Brady Bunch, died Sunday at a San Antonio hospital.

Bill Frey, a retired bishop and a longtime friend, said she suffered a fall Saturday at her San Antonio home and never recovered. Frey said Ms. Davis, who had long been a volunteer for the Episcopal Church, had lived with him and his wife, Barbara, since 1976.

"I'm shocked and saddened! I've lost a wonderful friend and colleague," Brady costar Florence Henderson said in a statement Sunday.

More than a decade before scoring as the Bradys' loyal Alice, Ms. Davis was the razor-tongued secretary on another stalwart TV sitcom, The Bob Cummings Show, which brought her two Emmys. Over the years, she also appeared on Broadway and in occasional movies.

She considered her ordinary look an asset.

"I know at least a couple hundred glamour gals who are starving in this town," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1955, the year the Cummings show began its four-year run. "I'd rather be myself and eating."

On The Brady Bunch, she portrayed a mainstay of stability.

"I think I'm lovable. That's the gift God gave me," she told the AP in a 1993 interview.

The Brady Bunch had a successful run until 1974, but it didn't die then. It returned as The Brady Bunch Hour (1977), The Brady Brides (1981), among other incarnations.

The Brady Bunch Movie, with Shelley Long and Gary Cole as the parents, was a surprise box-office hit in 1995. It had another actress as Alice, but Ms. Davis appeared in a bit part as a trucker.

She never married, saying she never found a man who was more interesting than her career. "By the time I started to get interested [in finding someone]," she told the Chicago Sun-Times, "all the good ones were taken."