As Sally Rogers in The Dick Van Dyke Show, Rose Marie, who has died aged 94, was known and cherished by the myriad television viewers who tuned in every week from 1961 to 1966 to watch the landmark sitcom.

Rose Marie, playing one of three comedy writers on the fictional Alan Brady Show, felt she had struck a blow for gender equality on American television because Sally was not a wife, mother or secretary but a writer equal to Rob Petrie (Van Dyke) and Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam). Witty and self-deprecating, desperately seeking a husband, Sally acted as a balance between Buddy, the “joke machine”, and the accident-prone Rob.

In her constant verbal jousting with Buddy, Sally offered “the woman’s point of view”. Always wearing a distinctive hair bow, she was in every episode of the show for five seasons, and was sometimes called upon to sing, reminding those in the know that she had already had a lengthy career as an all-round entertainer – one of the longest in show business history, covering nine decades, almost her whole life.

She started performing at the age of three under the name of Baby Rose Marie. At five she became a radio singing star on NBC, which offered her a seven-year contract. “I had a deep voice, not like Shirley Temple but more like Sophie Tucker,” she recalled. “I never sounded like a child so there were some people who thought I was really a 30-year-old midget.” To counteract these rumours, NBC arranged for her to make stage appearances around the country and to appear in a few short films such as Baby Rose Marie the Child Wonder (1929), in which she sang three jazzy songs. At the age of 10, still billed as Baby Rose Marie, she was seen belting out My Bluebirds Are Singing the Blues in a film called International House (1933), a crazy feature starring, among others, WC Fields, Rudy Vallée and Burns and Allen. She did not make another film for 20 years.

Always credited solely by her forenames, she was born in New York as Rose Marie Mazzetta, daughter of the Italian-American vaudeville actor Frank Mazzetta, who went by the name of Frank Curley, and his Polish-American wife, Stella Gluszcak. It was the latter who guided Rose Marie’s childhood stardom, though not in pushy, stage-mother fashion. “I had a wonderful time,” said Rose Marie. “I was never forced to do anything against my will.”

In her teens, having dropped the “Baby” from her name, she became a singing comedian on radio, where she was billed as “the darling of the airwaves”, as well as on records, in vaudeville and in nightclubs, continuing as an adult performer. In 1946, having just married Bobby Guy, a trumpet player with some of the leading big bands, she performed at the opening night of the Flamingo hotel in Las Vegas, which had been built by the gangster Bugsy Siegel.

In 1951 Rose Marie was cast opposite Phil Silvers on Broadway in the Johnny Mercer musical Top Banana, in which she had a show-stopping solo number, I Fought Every Step of the Way, likening a romantic relationship to a boxing match. But when United Artists released the film version of the show in 1954, all of Rose Marie’s numbers and some of her scenes had been cut. According to her 2002 autobiography, Hold the Roses, during rehearsals for the film she received unwelcome sexual advances from one of the film’s producers, which she firmly rejected with a wisecrack. Apparently he had told her: “This could be your picture. I’m the producer and I can see to it that it’s your movie ...”

Rose Marie, who never had to cope with a similar situation again, began her long television career in 1955 on The Red Skelton Hour, continuing, with hardly a break, to voicing characters in the animated series The Garfield Show from 2008 to 2013. In between were series that included The Bob Cummings Show (1958-59) and My Sister Eileen (1960-1961), before the five-year run of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

She nearly gave up acting in mid career after her husband died suddenly at the age of 48 in 1964, but was persuaded to stay by members of the Dick Van Dyke Show cast, whom she viewed as “my close family”. Following her signature role as Sally Rogers, she played a secretary working at a magazine in The Doris Day Show (1969-71), a variation of her wisecracking, lovelorn persona. Besides the sitcoms, she was also one of the regular panellists in the game show Hollywood Squares (1965-80).

From 1977 to 1985 Rose Marie picked up her singing career, touring in the musical revue 4 Girls 4 with Rosemary Clooney, Helen O’Connell and Margaret Whiting.

She is survived by her daughter, Georgiana.

• Rose Marie Mazzetta, actor and singer, born 15 August 1923; died 28 December 2017