Buff Cobb

Buff Cobb (born Patrizia Cobb Chapman, October 19, 1927 – July 12, 2010) was an Italian-born American actress and, with then-husband Mike Wallace, host of one of television's first talk-show shows. Early life and career Patrizia Cobb Chapman was born in Florence, Tuscany, Italy, to opera singer Frank Chapman, whose own father was the ornithologist and pioneering writer of field guides Frank Michler Chapman, and playwright Elizabeth Cobb, whose father was the author and humorist Irvin S. Cobb. When she was young, her parents divorced and her father married mezzo-soprano opera singer Gladys Swarthout. Her family moved first to New York City and then to Santa Monica, California, where Cobb graduated from high school. She began her acting career with stock companies, and then won bit parts in movies including Anna and the King of Siam (1946), and toured with Tallulah Bankhead in Noël Coward's play Private Lives from 1946 to 1948.