Thursday, February 26, 2009

Advertising icon Clara Peller

Talk about your "little old lady in tennis shoes." Tiny Clara Peller, age 81, hit the ad-world big time in 1984 in a Wendy's commercial.

She and two other elderly ladies were looking at the non-Wendy's burgers they had just purchased from a fictitious hamburger chain that advertised its big bun. Peller, in her miraculously gruff and raspy old lady voice, growled out the line "Where's the beef?" This phrase became a metaphor for all that was not as it should be in American life.

Other versions of "Where's the beef?" were made for Wendy's using the suddenly famous Peller--that is, until she uttered a variant of her famous line in a Prego pasta sauce commercial.

Peller, who had worked as a Chicago manicurist, died in 1987 at 85.

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