(June 9, 1947 – December 10, 2004)
from The Greenwood Project
Born in Nashville in 1947, Beverly Gail Neely, known professionally as Gail Neely, had a long career in movies, television, and television commercials, and her face became familiar to many viewers. Her film roles included Winnie Mandela in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991) with Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley; an operating room nurse in The Doctor (1991) with William Hurt; a nurse again in Betrayal of the Dove (1993); and top-billed Eleanor “Mama” Washington in Surf Nazis Must Die (1987). She also appeared in a number of television series, including L. A. Law (1986-88), Dave’s World (1994), The Wayans Bros. (1995-96), and C-16: FBI (1997), and she was seen in TV movies Winnie (1988) and The Heart of Justice (1992) with Vincent Price, Dennis Hopper, and Dermot Mulroney. She was perhaps most familiar to TV audiences as the down-to-earth “Maureen” in a long-running series of Philips Milk of Magnesia commercials (“Mauree-een, you don’t even know these people!”).
Gail Neely (photo from Find a Grave website)
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The Greenwood Project is a series of 160-word biographies of individuals who lie at rest in Mt. Ararat and Greenwood cemeteries, two historic African American burial grounds in Nashville, Tennessee. The project, which began in September 2014 (and is still available on Facebook, at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100064806156276), shares the stories of more than 300 consequential individuals, primarily African American, who changed the course of city, state, and national history through their words and deeds. (All biographies were written by Kathy Lauder unless otherwise noted.)
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