Edra Jeanne Peaker, known professionally as E.J. Peaker, was an American actress, singer, and dancer who appeared in the 1969 Hollywood film Hello, Dolly! directed by Gene Kelly and starring Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau, built a career in Broadway musical theatre, television series, and cabaret performance across five decades, and was remembered as a performer whose warmth, vocal quality, and theatrical instinct brought genuine joy to the musicals and productions in which she worked. She died on 13 August 2026 in Las Vegas, Nevada, at the age of 83.
She was born on 24 February 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and grew up aspiring to a career in the performing arts. She trained as a singer and dancer and was drawn toward the Broadway musical theatre tradition that was producing some of the most celebrated productions in American entertainment during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The great Broadway shows of the era combined theatrical ambition, popular music craftsmanship, and the physical demands of dance in productions that required performers with exceptional range across multiple disciplines, and the performers who built careers in that world developed the versatility and professional discipline that working in the form required.
She appeared in the original Broadway production of Hello, Dolly!, the show based on Thornton Wilder’s play The Matchmaker and set to music by Jerry Herman, which opened in January 1964 with Carol Channing in the title role of Dolly Levi and became one of the most successful Broadway productions of the decade. The show ran for 2,844 performances, won ten Tony Awards including Best Musical, and established Hello, Dolly! as one of the defining shows of the Golden Age of Broadway musicals, its central character and its most famous song entering the permanent repertoire of American popular music. She subsequently appeared in the 1969 20th Century Fox film adaptation directed by Gene Kelly, the studio’s major musical production of the era, which starred Barbra Streisand in the role of Dolly Levi opposite Walter Matthau as Horace Vandergelder in a lavishly budgeted film that was one of the last of the old-style Hollywood roadshow musicals. Despite disappointing box office results on its initial release, the film has been reassessed more positively in subsequent years as a document of the Hollywood musical tradition and as a performance by Streisand that displayed her gifts at the height of her early career.
She had a recurring television role as Nurse Strickland on The Bold Ones: The Doctors, the NBC medical drama series that ran from 1969 to 1973, and appeared in a range of television productions and variety programmes throughout the 1970s that maintained her visibility in popular entertainment. She also performed in nightclub and cabaret settings for many years, working in Las Vegas, where she eventually settled, and in other venues where the classic Broadway and Hollywood songbook repertoire found appreciative audiences among theatregoers who valued the style and material of the mid-twentieth-century American musical tradition. She was 83 years old.