Martha Raye (27 August 1916 – 19 October 1994) was an American comic actress and standards singer who performed in movies, and later on television . In the early 1930s, Raye was a band vocalist with the Paul Ash and Boris Morros orchestras . She made her first film appearance in 1934 in a band short titled A Nite in the Nite Club . In 1936, she was signed for comic roles by Paramount Pictures, and made her first picture for Paramount . Her first feature film was Rhythm on the Range with crooner Bing Crosby . Over the next 26 years, she would eventually appear with many of the leading comics of her day, including Joe E . Brown, Bob Hope, W . C . Fields, Abbott and Costello, Charlie Chaplin, and Jimmy Durante . She joined the USO soon after the US entered World War II . Martha Raye was known for the size of her mouth, which appeared large in proportion to the rest of her face, thus earning her the nickname "The Big Mouth ." She often alluded to this in a subsequent series of commercials for Polident denture toothpaste in the 1980s: "So take it from The Big Mouth...new Polident Green gets tough stains clean!"[citation needed] Her mouth would come to relegate her motion picture work to largely supporting comic parts, and was often made up in such a way that it appeared even larger than it already was. In the Warner Brothers cartoon The Woods are Full of Cuckoos, she is portrayed as a jazzy scat-singing donkey named "Moutha Bray". In October 1966, she went to Soc Trang, Vietnam, to entertain the troops at the base which was the home base of the 121st Aviation company, the Soc Trang Tigers, the gunship platoon, The Vikings and the 336th Aviation company. Shortly after her arrival, both units were called out on a mission to extract supposed POWs from an area nearby. Raye decided to hold her troupe of entertainers there until the mission was completed so that all of the servicemen could watch her show. .