Jean Kerr, whose wry wit and unerring eye for life’s everyday absurdities kept legions of readers and theatergoers laughing with books such as Please Don’t Eat the Daisies and plays such as Mary, Mary, died Sunday at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y. She was 80 years old.
The apparent cause was pneumonia, her son Christopher said. She lived in Larchmont, N.Y.
Kerr was the widow of the drama critic Walter Kerr. The Kerrs made their debut as a team on Broadway in 1946 with Song of Bernadette.
Kerr scored her first big success outside the theater with the publication in 1957 of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. The book became a runaway best seller and then a popular movie in 1960 with David Niven and Doris Day. It also became a television situation comedy.
Her family was a rich source of comic inspiration.
Walter Kerr, whose career embraced teaching, playwriting, directing and theater criticism — first for The New York Herald Tribune and then for The Times — died in 1996 at age 83.
