Virginia Sale, 92; Actress Made Age an Asset

Virginia Sale, a flying grandmother for Western Airlines, the town busybody on “Petticoat Junction,” a scrubwoman terrorized by hoodlums in Humphrey Bogart films and the funky elderly maiden filling her gas tank with Gulf, died Sunday.

The actress, who also performed as Virginia Sale Wren, using her married name, was 92, said a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture and Television Country Hospital in Woodland Hills, where she had been living.

In her white wig, granny glasses, rumpled print dress and frilly hat, she appeared in more than 200 TV shows and dozens of feature films as the homely sister or meek maid. And she was in countless commercials, which became the major source of her income as she grew older. She also gave an estimated 6,000 performances of her “One Woman Show” before audiences in the United States and Europe and before American troops during World War II.

In 1949 she and her late husband, Sam Wren, starred in the nationally televised “Wren’s Nest,” a thrice-weekly situation comedy about a suburban New York couple and their 12-year-old twins.

She had been cast as the perennial little old lady since she was a young, attractive brunette in her 20s, finding character parts easier to land than glamour roles after she arrived in Hollywood in 1927. It was her brother, comedian and character actor Charles (Chic) Sale, who had encouraged her to give up her waitress job at a New York City restaurant. He became known throughout the country as vaudeville’s “The Specialist”--a carpenter who constructed only outhouses.

Miss Sale trained at the University of Illinois and the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and prided herself on her mastery of American accents.

“I can do an accent from any part of the country except Brooklynese,” she told The Times in 1975. “I never could do that . . . because I don’t understand it.”

After she gave birth to twins in 1936, she cut back on her road appearances but continued in films and on radio. From 1938 to 1945 she was the voice of Martha, the New England housekeeper on the radio series “Those We Love.”

Her husband worked as an executive at the Warner Bros. and Columbia studios while she was doing character parts in “Viennese Nights,” “Sob Sisters,” “Madame Dubarry,” “The Sin of Madelon Claudet,” “Topper,” “Moby Dick” and “Strike Up the Band,” among others.

More recently she was seen in “Paradise Road,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Slither.” By the late 1950s she was doing commercials almost exclusively, likening the auditions for them to a gathering of old friends--actors and actresses she had worked with on stage and in films 20 or 30 years ago.

She said she learned to wear a white wig to appear older, which often helped, but did lose out on several jobs to other granny types “because I can’t take out my teeth.”

Survivors include her daughter, Ginny, and her son, Christopher.