Anne Kimbell (1956)

Kimbell was best known to Broadway at the time for her starring role in The Seven Year Itch with Eddie Bracken and her national tour in the same play. She was also cast in the leading role in Arms and the Man with Marlon Brando.

Denver audiences were treated this season to a wide range of plays, from The Seven Year Itch, the familiar hilarious comedy about Richard Sherman, a man seven years married who finds himself involved with the girl upstairs while his wife and little boy are away on vacation, to The Desperate Hours, a nerve-tingling story of an American family held prisoner in its own home by three desperate escaped convicts.

[Borrillo, Theodore A., (2012). Denver’s historic Elitch Theatre : a nostalgic journey (a history of its times). pp. 240.]

Our lovely leading lady is best known to Broadway for her starring role in “The Seven Year Itch” with Eddie Bracken, and her later national tour in the same play. She scored another notable hit in the leading role of “Arms and the Man” with Marlon Brando, in 1945, and, too, in “The Lady’s not for Burning” with Vincent Price on a west coast tour. As Franchot Tone’s leading lady, she played in “Jason” at the Sombrero Theatre in Phoenix, Arizona. She has charmingly and expertly filled the leading feminine roles on over 60 TV shows, including Omnibus, Schlitz Playhouse, Four Star Playhouse, Favorite Story, Crossroads, Racket Squad, the Fireside Theatre, and the G. E. Theatre. An English major at the University of California, at Los Angeles, Miss Kimbell combines beauty with brains to give us one of the most glamorous leading ladies we have seen in many years on the Elitch stage. Even long before her college days, however, her career was set, for she played her first role at the age of 12, as Rosalind Russell’s daughter in the picture “Roughly Speaking.”

[1956 Elitch’s Theatre Program]

[Kimbell] first came to Colorado in the 1950s as leading lady at the famed Elitch Garden Theater in Denver, and at that time fell in love with the state. While on stage in London she met and married James F. Relph, a Foreign Service Officer. Together they lived in Switzerland, Germany, and in the African nations of Chad and Tunisia.

She founded a school for women in the Republic of Chad, and developed cross-cultural programs for women in Tunisia. Ms. Relph loved traveling the world and was always open-minded about people from other cultures and religions.

After returning to California in the early 1980s, Ms. Relph served as an executive director of the University of Southern California’s Orange County Center. She founded the “Enterprising Woman” organization to provide education and support to women who were going into business for themselves.

During that period, in 1992, she came to Colorado to buy a small horse ranch, and ended up purchasing the historic Jones Theater in Westcliffe which was going to be turned into a laundromat. Her goal was to preserve the theater for the Wet Mountain Valley, and she always considered Westcliffe to be her home, though she continued to return seasonally to Laguna Beach, Calif.

Ms. Relph always enjoyed the friendly people who lived in Custer County, and was always gratified when people would be inspired by what they saw at the Jones Theater. She had a passion for keeping the arts alive in a small community, and especially loved seeing local kids pursue the arts. She was the founder of the Westcliffe Center for the Arts, and over the years served as its president, producer and artistic director up until the time of her death.

She also was instrumental in developing the annual Shakespeare in the Park festival here.

Ms. Relph held a bachelor of arts degree in English from the University of Virginia, and a master’s degree in women’s studies from George Washington University. She also spoke French and German.

[“Stage and screen star Anne Kimbell Relph dies”. Wet Mountain Tribune. 2017-06-01.]