Gretchen Wyler, who died Sunday at 75, was a star of Broadway musicals in the 1950s and 1960s who became a convert to the animal welfare cause in the late 1960s and spent the rest of her career loudly banging the gong for everything from puppies at the Warwick, N.Y., pound to elephants in the Los Angeles Zoo.

Trained as a dancer from age 6, Wyler used an impressive set of hoofs to make it to Broadway in the chorus of the original “Guys and Dolls” in 1953. Later she was cast as a series of temptresses, in the Cole Porter musical “Silk Stockings,” in “Damn Yankees,” and in “Bye Bye Birdie,” where she took over for Chita Rivera as Rose Grant.

Once an avid consumer of steak, she told the Hartford Courant that she became a vegetarian “cold turkey” after visiting a slaughterhouse in 1968. “I went home and cried all night,” she said. “I haven’t had a bullion cube since then.”

An enthusiastic dog owner who raised and showed Great Danes, Wyler designed and managed the Warwick, N.Y. pound for a decade, then moved to Los Angeles, where she sat on the L.A. Zoo directors advisory committee, a perfect position to snipe at its treatment of chimpanzees and orangutans. When the L.A. Zoo in 2002 decided to move an elephant named Ruby to a zoo in Knoxville, Tenn., Wyler led the fight to reunite Ruby with her longtime companion elephant, Gita, arguing that elephants are social creatures who deserve to remain with their friends. The elephants were eventually reunited, although Gita died in 2006.

“She was a wonderful actress,” a TV writer who once directed Wyler for an episode of the 1980s show “Hart to Hart” and also led fund-raising efforts for the L.A. Zoo, Tom Mankiewicz, told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. “She’s obviously very sincere in her beliefs. We disagree with her about elephants.”

Wyler grew up in the tiny oil town of Bartlesville, Okla., and from the beginning was determined to become a professional dancer. “The motivation was that I was born cross-eyed,” she told the Times in 1978. “Even at that age I felt it would not show that I was ugly if I were a dancer.” An operation at age 9 cured the condition.

She made her Broadway debut in 1948 as a member of the chorus in “Where’s Charley?” She said it was the star of the show, Ray Bolger, who convinced her to change her last name to Wyler from Wienecke.

In between appearances in eight Broadway productions, Wyler toured extensively, often with a pet cat in tow. As her career on Broadway flagged, she started doing supper club appearances. Her last Broadway show was the 1976 production “Sly Fox,” starring George C. Scott, in which she played a “hustler with a heart of brass.” She moved to Los Angeles with the traveling production of the show in 1979 and decided to stay to try her luck as a television actress. A familiar face in gueststarring roles on 1980s dramas, she also was a regular on “Dallas” and other shows.

She became vice president of the Hollywood chapter of the Humane Society and one of the most visible animal advocates in the whole Tinseltown bestiary. She said she took her cues from Doris Day and Brigitte Bardot.

“Doris stopped wearing fur in ’72 publicly,” she told the Times in 2006. “And Brigitte was on the ice floes in the ’60s protesting the clubbing of baby seals. Those are the two women in my generation who inspired me.”

Gretchen Wyler
Born Gretchen Patricia Wienecke on February 16, 1932, in Oklahoma City; married once and divorced; died May 27 of complications of breast cancer at her home in Camarillo, Calif.