Janet Nelson Berger, who started her profession as a secretary at CBS within the mid-Nineteen Fifties earlier than rising to grow to be a manufacturing assistant and casting director in an period when few girls held managerial roles in community tv, has died. She was 87.
Berger died July 22 at her dwelling in Los Angeles of pneumonia and problems from a stroke, her husband, Emmy-winning producer Robert “Buzz” Berger, mentioned.
Janet Berger labored usually for producer Herbert Brodkin, first at CBS and later at his unbiased firm, Plautus Productions.
She contributed to 19 episodes of the acclaimed CBS anthology program Playhouse 90 — together with a dwell, shade adaptation by George Balanchine of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker in 1958 — and to a 1959 manufacturing of Hamlet for CBS’ DuPont Present of the Month. (Each had been directed by Ralph Nelson.)
Later, she contributed to such socially acutely aware Nineteen Sixties drama collection as The Defenders, The Docs and the Nurses and For the Individuals.
Born in New Jersey, Janet Dolores Nelson graduated from Purple Financial institution Catholic Excessive College and earned an affiliate diploma in English from Georgetown Visitation Junior School in Washington.
She married fellow casting director Buzz Berger in 1963, and the couple lived for almost six years in London as he graduated to producing. Throughout this time, she studied French culinary arts at Le Cordon Bleu and traveled broadly all through Europe, accompanying and helping her husband on location.
They returned to the U.S. in 1971, settling first in New York Metropolis and later dividing their time between New Canaan, Connecticut, and L.A.
Buzz’s productions throughout this era included the five-part 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust, which starred Meryl Streep and James Woods and was produced by Brodkin and filmed in Vienna (that earned him his Emmy); and docudramas about Andrei Sakharov (starring Jason Robards), Edward R. Murrow (Daniel J. Travanti) and Nelson Mandela (Danny Glover).
Janet Berger remained energetic in philanthropic work all through her life, serving on advisory boards and fund-raising committees for such establishments because the AFI, the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Conduct and the L.A. County Museum of Artwork.
She was additionally an avid tennis participant and a member of the Queen’s Membership in London and the Riviera Tennis Membership.
Along with her husband, survivors embody their son, James, and her youthful brother, Jerry.