Connie Izay

Constance Blanche Ruscetti was born in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Joseph Ruscetti and Rose Palazzi Ruscetti. She graduated from Hopewell High School in Aliquippa in 1947,[1] and trained as a nurse at Sewickley Valley Hospital. In her twenties, she moved to Albuquerque with her parents.[2]

Izay was a registered nurse. She worked as a nurse educator in the Virgin Islands for two years,[2][3] and was employed at the Lovelace Clinic in New Mexico, where she helped with medical testing for the first American astronauts.[4]

Izay was also active in community theater in Albuquerque.[3][5] She married a theatre director, and moved to Los Angeles with him. She sometimes worked as a studio nurse, and sometimes played nurses in medical television programs. She was "Nurse Connie" in three episodes of M*A*S*H, and played a nurse in Man from Atlantis and Marcus Welby, M.D.[6] "Though she's never seen a shrapnel wound in her life, Izay is now regularly called upon to bandage simulated war wounds on the Korean front," noted a 1980 profile.[4] She was also a medical technical advisor on several television shows, especially Marcus Welby and M*A*S*H, but also an episode of Bonanza that involved a kitchen-table surgery to remove a bullet.[7] She was "on the set at all times",[8] read scripts for medical errors, highlighted terminology actors might need help to pronounce correctly, and showed actors how to hold medical equipment.[4][6]

Beyond the technical aspects of her work, she tried to improve how nurses were portrayed on television. "I recall many a day when she'd come home elated because she and Loretta (Swit) had instigated change in the image that the nurses would present in the series," recalled her husband in 1983.[9]

Ruscetti married actor Victor Izay in 1955.[2] They had three children, Gregory, Victoria, and Stephen.[10] She died from breast cancer in 1982, in Los Angeles, at the age of 53.[11] The 1983 M*A*S*H episode "As Time Goes By", the last episode filmed for the series,[12] and the second-to-last episode aired, was dedicated to her memory.[13]

• Connie Izay at IMDb