There are moments in a ceremony that transcend the occasion they were designed for — moments when the person standing at the microphone says something so completely and so unexpectedly true that the room stops being an audience and becomes something else entirely, a collection of human beings suddenly and simultaneously reminded of something they had forgotten they needed to be reminded of.
Ann-Margret created one of those moments when she stepped onto the stage to accept her lifetime USO honor at 85, and the words she found — not the words a speechwriter prepared or a publicist approved, but the ones that arrived from somewhere deeper and more personal than any prepared remarks could reach — left every person in that room in the particular suspended silence that only genuine emotion produces, the silence that falls when someone says the thing that was always true and always needed saying and was simply waiting for exactly this person and exactly this moment to be said.
Ann-Margret has been making those USO trips for over fifty years — climbing onto transport planes, landing in places the entertainment press never followed her, standing on makeshift stages in the desert heat and the jungle humidity and every difficult corner of the world where American service members were stationed and needed to know that somebody back home loved them enough to come — and the lifetime of those trips, the faces she saw and the hands she shook and the young men and women she performed for who did not all come home, was present in every word she said on that stage, giving her acceptance speech the weight of something lived rather than something written.
Ann-Margret On Her 85th Birthday Awarded Rare Honor For Decades Of Service To America’s USO
It was a special day at the Motion Picture Academy’s Margaret Herrick Library yesterday.
On Wednesday, Ann-Margret got a rare award the day after her 85th birthday as she was presented with the commemorative USO Challenge Coin in honor of her years of service to American service members. The honor represented only the second time the coin was ever given, and it came on the anniversary of the first given to Bob Hope on the 50th anniversary of the organization in 1990.
This week’s ceremony was a bit of kismet as 2026 also marks the 85th birthday for the USO, which since being founded in 1941 has become the leading nonprofit dedicated to strengthening the well-being of the people serving in America’s military and their families. Since the start of World War II, the USO has been by the side of service members throughout their military service.
For her entire career, Ann-Margret has been a dedicated supporter of the military and has toured three times with the USO, twice traveling to Southeast Asia to perform for American service members in Vietnam, and at moments on that first trip getting dangerously close to the line of fire herself. This is such a rare honor to receive one of these specially minted coins that carry deep significance in the military community as symbols of trust, shared experience and belonging.
“I have always had such a great time doing these tours, and then to see my guys since then come up to me and say I saw you in Vietnam and Da Nang and then to say, ‘Well I liked you in Bye Bye Birdie and Viva Las Vegas,’ ” she told me in a conversation I moderated after she was presented with the coin. I threw in Kitten With a Whip as one she probably heard from them about as well on those ’60s tours. And then I mentioned her two Oscar nominations. for Carnal Knowledge and Tommy, and a few more. “I am exhausted just hearing about those movies,” she said. “Of course I was younger then but still feel the excitement.”
Ann-Margret has total recall of the tours, from her first to Vietnam with singer Johnny Rivers in 1966, and then of course with Hope in 1968 on a much bigger scale that went from a guitar and piano to a full orchestra backing them.
“Those tours and all my guys mean the world to me, I remember all of them, all of them ” she said, getting emotional thinking about it all including the many bedside visits she has made to veterans. We were sitting in The Bob Hope Lobby of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Library as she also reminisced about being on stage with Hope, whose 93-year-old daughter Linda was among Wednesday’s attendees and spoke of the importance of the USO to her father and in taking major stars overseas with him to entertain the troops over the years, Marilyn Monroe famously being another enthusiastically welcomed to the battle zones.
Ann-Margret first met Hope in a very public setting, the 1962 Academy Awards, where he was emceeing and she, largely unknown at that point, appeared to sing the nominated song “Bachelor In Paradise” from Hope’s film. The next day all anyone could talk about on that show was the knockout and sultry performance from this unknown new star.
“Bob had no idea what I looked like, he had heard about Ann-Margret, but he just thought she was this dancing pony,” she laughed, and then talked about doing the same soft-shoe dance Hope did overseas on stage with every performer traveling with him, not just her. “I had to learn his choreography!”
The star also talked about reuniting with the USO in 2005 for a show in Nevada, four and a half decades after her first experience as a college student at Northwestern working with the USO — long before she was world famous. “I can’t stay away,” she said. “This afternoon is bringing back so many great memories.”
In addition to Linda Hope and numerous friends, the tribute included such attendees as Bruce Vilanch (who told the room he first encountered Ann-Margret competing on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour where she lost to a contestant playing “Lady of Spain” on a leaf), USO CEO Michael Linnington, and the honorable Barbara Barrett from the USO Board of Governors.
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