Dorothy Collins; Singer on TV’s ‘Your Hit Parade’

Dorothy Collins, the “Lucky Strike Girl” on television’s “Your Hit Parade” and later one of the performers who confounded unsuspecting victims on “Candid Camera,” has died at age 67.

Ron Holgate, her ex-husband, said Collins died Thursday night. The cause of death was unknown, but a heart attack was suspected, he said.

“She’s been sick for a very long time,” Holgate said. He said she had asthma.

Collins, who sang on the radio with big bands when she was a teen-ager, landed a job in the 1950s selling Lucky Strike cigarettes on “Your Hit Parade.” Placed in the middle of the Lucky Strike bulls-eye, Collins would sing the jingle “Be happy, go Lucky.” She later sang weekly top hits on the show and became one of its stars.

“Your Hit Parade,” a spinoff of radio’s “Lucky Strike Hit Parade,” ran from 1950 to 1959. The TV show featured elaborate production numbers of the week’s seven most popular songs, with a regular buildup to No. 1.

In the 1960s, Collins appeared frequently on Allen Funt’s “Candid Camera,” setting up gags on unwitting victims. One memorable stunt was the time she innocently asked men to help her with a car that wouldn’t start, and they would lift the hood and find no engine.

In 1971, she appeared on Broadway in the Stephen Sondheim hit musical “Follies,” about aging showgirls in a soon-to-be-demolished Broadway theater.

She also appeared in a number of other musicals, including “South Pacific” and “My Fair Lady.”

She spent years working as a volunteer for the Muscular Dystrophy Assn., and appeared frequently on its Labor Day weekend telethons.

Despite her role as a Lucky Strike pitch woman, Collins never smoked, Holgate said.

Collins was born Nov. 18, 1926, in Windsor, Canada. She got her first break in the late 1940s as a singer for bandleader Raymond Scott, whom she later married. He was musical director of the “Hit Parade.”

Collins had lived for the past 1 1/2 years with her daughter in Watervliet, just north of Albany. She died at home there.

Funeral plans were incomplete.