Actress Loretta Ables Sayre confirms that letting her hair go gray enabled her to land jobs like “Pretty Little Liars: Summer School” last year.
“I have now graduated from the mom/auntie roles to the tutu age market,” she said in an e-mail. “And frankly, I love it.”
Widely known for her Tony-nominated role of Bloody Mary in Lincoln Center’s revival of Rodgers and Hamilton’s “South Pacific” 16 years ago on Broadway, Ables Sayre surmises “there might be less gray-haired tutus in the Polynesian/Asian category that are looking for work (but) I love the freedom of being who I am and not having to worry about touching up my roots. At this point, darker hair didn’t make me look younger. It just made me look like I was in denial.”
On April 1, Ables Sayre will turn 66 and admitted her dye job days are over. “No one was looking at me saying ‘gee, I wonder if she’s still in her 50s?’ Letting my hair go gray the way it has wanted to the past 35-plus years was freeing.
Further, going gray was empowering and enabled her to land the role of a grandma named Lola in “Pretty Little Liars: Summer School” which she completed filming in New York last year. Appropriately, Lola is a name and also the term that Filipinos call their grandma (Ables is Filipino, so she knows!).
Ables Sayre portrays the tutu of Minnie Mouse, her granddaughter enacted by Malia Pyles in the HBO/MAX series, and the mother of Tony winner Lea Salonga, of “Miss Saigon” fame, who plays her daughter Elodie.
She wasn’t in “Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin” (Season 1) but makes her debut in “Summer School” ( Season 2), likely to premiere sometime in spring, continuing the topsy-turvy life in Millwood.
“I don’t think having gray hair means you look frumpy,” said Ables Sayre.
“If you have a great cut that still looks fun and sexy, you can rock that. Being older doesn’t have to mean being over the hill. You can be gray and still sparkle; I have a great hair stylist, Donna Tokumoto, who keeps me in shape.”
Ables Sayre said filming was whirlwind but fab – “everybody brought their A-game to the set every day” – and the challenge was to complete the work complicated by the dual WGA and the SAG/AFTRA strikes. The Hollywood walkouts paused production and filming resume when the strikes were settled.
“I would come home whenever I could but sometimes, I would only be home for about four days before I had to head back to New York,” she said.
Enough to give one gray or white hair…
Bruno Mars has gambling debt
Hawaii’s superstar Bruno Mars (pictured below), who has an ongoing stint at the MGM casino in Las Vegas, apparently is an extravagant gambler, according to the News Nation website.
Mars, a professional poker player, has apparently logged significant gambling losses at the MGM, with a Vegas source indicating that the debt is in the $50 million range.
As the resident attraction in the casino’s showroom, Mars’ revenues from his performances likely will be paybacks to clear the debt.
Good thing Mars is completing a new album – his first solo disc since 2016’s “24K Magic” — and is in early conversations with Live Nation to plan a concert tour to support the disc through 2025.
He has been on an international tour with his group, The Hooligans, which has sell-out tours in key markets like Tokyo, so he’s cashing in huge sums.
He also has a secondary R&B career with Silk Sonic, with his blues partner Anderson .Paik. Their 2021 debut studio album, “An Evening With Silk Sonic,” earned four Grammy trophies…
And that’s Show Biz…