Dina Claire Culff of Anderson, SC, formerly of Livingston, passed from this world in the comfort of home hospice care on April 10 at the age of 86, after a long struggle with cancer. The granddaughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Dina was born in Newark, NJ and gifted with a magnificent singing voice. She recorded her first single at the age of six, and at ten she sang for First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
She went on to have an illustrious stage and screen career that spanned decades, playing Marjorie May in the Broadway production and company tour of Gypsy with Ethel Merman and Natalie Wood, and appearing in the classic film version as well. She performed at Carnegie Hall and starred as Alice in Radio City Music Hall’s Easter show, Alice in Easterland. During this time, she studied with the Grand Opera and recorded an album, The Jewish Heart, now available on iTunes.
From the 1960s through the early 2000s, she was known for her stage performance, The Dina Claire Show, which she performed in the resort hotels of New York’s Catskill Mountains, in Pennsylvania’s Poconos resorts and in Florida. She shared the stage with some of America’s great comedians, including Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield, Morey Amsterdam, Red Buttons, George Jessel and Rip Taylor. In the 1980s she performed in Washington, DC for President Jimmy Carter’s cabinet and many foreign dignitaries, as well as astronaut and Senator John Glenn.
Dina met the love of her life, Donald Culff of London, England, on the Olympia, a Greek cruise ship where she was performing and he was the manager of the ship’s gift shop. The couple married and had two daughters, Gillian and Nancy, whom they raised in Livingston. They lived there for nearly 30 years before moving to West Orange and later retiring to the South.
There, Dina established the Spotlight Vocal Studio, coaching area students in vocal and stage presentation techniques while nurturing their talents. She created a course called the “Power Thinking Method” for overcoming stage fright, which she taught in area schools and presented a workshop about her career at Furman University. She performed at the Piccolo Spoleto Music Festival in Charleston, played Eda Strauss in ACT Theater’s Titanic and sang with the Choir of Hope and Remembrance for survivors of breast cancer. In 2018, Dina recorded an interview with the Wexler Oral History Project of the Yiddish Book Center in Amherst,
