Barbara Billingsley

Barbara Billingsley (born December 22, 1915) is an American film, television and character actress, who in her five decades of television came to prominence in the 1950s as an everyday mother, June Cleaver, on Leave it to Beaver, and its sequel, Still the Beaver (also known as The New Leave It to Beaver), two decades later. It was during that time she provided the voice of the unseen Nanny on Jim Henson's Muppet Babies.

Career

With a year at Los Angeles Junior College behind her, Billingsley traveled to Broadway when Straw Hat, a revue in which she was appearing, attracted enough attention to send it to New York. When, after five days, the show closed, she took an apartment on 57th Street and went to work as a $60-a-week fashion model.

As an actress on the silver screen, she had usually uncredited roles in major motion picture productions in the 1940s. These roles continued into the first half of the 1950s with The Bad and the Beautiful as well as the sci-fi story Invaders from Mars (1953). Her film experience led to roles on the sitcoms Professional Father (with Stephen Dunne and Beverly Washburn) and The Brothers as well as an appearance with David Niven on his anthology series Four Star Playhouse. In 1957, she guest starred in the episode "That Magazine" of the CBS sitcom Mr. Adams and Eve, starring Howard Duff and Ida Lupino.

Billingsley became best known for her role from 1957-1963 as June Cleaver in the television sitcom Leave It to Beaver. She portrayed the wife of Ward Cleaver (Hugh Beaumont) and the mother of Wally (Tony Dow) and Beaver Cleaver (Jerry Mathers). The Cleaver household became iconic in its representation of an archetypal suburban lifestyle associated with 1950s America. In the show, Billingsley often could be seen doing household chores wearing pearls and earrings. The pearls were her idea. The actress has what she termed "a hollow" on her neck^[1] and thought that wearing a strand of pearls could cover it up for the cameras. In later seasons of the show she also started wearing high heels to compensate for the fact that the actors who played her sons were getting taller than she.^[2] The sitcom show ran from 1957 to 1963 and proved to be very lucrative for Billingsley.

When production of the show ended in 1963, Billingsley became typecast as saccharine sweet and had trouble obtaining acting jobs for years. She traveled extensively abroad until the late 1970s. After an absence of 17 years from the public eye (other than appearing in two episodes of The F.B.I. in 1971), Billingsley spoofed her wholesome image with a brief appearance in the comedy Airplane! (1980), as a passenger who could "speak jive."

She became the voice of Nanny and The Little Train on Muppet Babies from 1984 to 1991.

Billingsley appeared with Jane Wyatt on a 1981 episode of Happy Days. She appeared in a Leave It to Beaver reunion television movie entitled Still the Beaver in 1983, a year after her on-screen husband during the six-year original run of the series, Hugh Beaumont, died of a heart attack, thus, playing the widowed mother. She also appeared in the subsequent revival of her series in, The New Leave It to Beaver (1985-1989). In the 1997 film version of Leave It to Beaver, Billingsley played the character "Aunt Martha". In 1998, she appeared on "Candid Camera", along with June Lockhart and Isabel Sanford, as audience members in a spoof seminar on motherhood.

Now in her 90's, Billingsley completed a role on NBC's sitcom My Name Is Earl in 2007.

On May 6, 2008, while being hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, she was unable to attend the Academy Leonard Goldenson Theatre in North Hollywood, California, where the Academy of Television Arts & Science presented, "A Salute to TV Moms." The surviving TV moms who attended the party were: Marjorie Lord, Holland Taylor, Bonnie Franklin, Vicki Lawrence, Tichina Arnold, Cloris Leachman, Doris Roberts, Diahann Carroll, Catherine Hicks and Meredith Baxter. In Billingsley's absence, her name was mentioned in her honor.

Personal life

Billingsley was born Barbara Lillian Combes in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Robert Collyer Combes and Lillian A. (née McLaughlin) Combes. Her parents divorced while Barbara was an adolescent. She and her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, a successful restaurateur, had two sons, Drew and Glenn, Jr. Since 1974, Drew and Glenn have owned and operated Billingsley's Restaurant in West Los Angeles, in the tradition of their father, and their great uncle, Sherman Billingsley, founder of New York City's very fashionable 1940s-era nightclub, The Stork Club. Billingsley divorced Glenn Billingsley, but kept his surname professionally, and later married Roy Kellino, a director. After Kellino's death, she married Dr. William Mortenson, who died in 1981.

Billingsley is related by marriage to actor/producer Peter Billingsley, known for his starring role as Ralphie in the seasonal classic A Christmas Story. First husband Glenn's cousin is Peter's mother, Gail Billingsley.

Film roles (credited)

• The Argyle Secrets (1948)
• Valiant Hombre (1948)
• Prejudice (1949)
• I Cheated the Law (1949)
• Air Hostess (1949)
• Shadow on the Wall (1950)
• Trial Without Jury (1950)
• Pretty Baby (1950)
• Three Guys Named Mike (1951)
• Inside Straight (1951)
• Two Dollar Bettor (1951)
• The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
• Young Man with Ideas (1952)
• Woman in the Dark (1952)
• The Lady Wants Mink (1953)
• The Careless Years (1957)
• Airplane! (1980)
• Still the Beaver (1983) (TV)
• Back to the Beach (1987)
• Leave It to Beaver (1997)
• Secret Santa (2003) (TV)

Television shows

• Schlitz Playhouse of Stars (1953-1955)
• City Detective episodes "The Corpse on the Carousel" (1953) and "The Glass Thumb" (1954)
• Four Star Playhouse (1953-1955)
• The Brothers (1956)
• Make Room for Daddy (1957)
• Leave It to Beaver (1957-1963)
• The F.B.I. (1971)
• Mork and Mindy (1982)
• Amazing Stories (1985)
• Jim Henson's Muppet Babies (1984-1990)
• The New Leave It to Beaver (1985-1989)
• Roseanne (1995)
• Mysterious Ways (2000)
• My Name is Earl (2007)

Further reading

• Applebaum, Irwyn. The World According to Beaver. TV Books, 1984, 1998.
• Mathers, Jerry. ...And Jerry Mathers as "The Beaver". Berkley Boulevard Books, 1998.

References

External links

• Barbara Billingsley at the Internet Movie Database
• Barbara Billingsley at Allmovie