Dallas's Miss Ellie is dead at 82

Daily Mail11 April 2012
The Weekender

Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for exclusive competitions, offers and theatre ticket deals

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

Barbara Bel Geddes, best known for her role as Dallas's Miss Ellie, has died at 82.

She had been battling lung cancer.

Although she played the matriarch of the Ewing clan in the TV series for more than ten years, she was also an accomplished movie and stage performer.

She was the first actress to play Maggie, the caustic, sexually starved wife in Tennessee Williams's 1955 Broadway play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

She was nominated for an Oscar for the 1948 movie I Remember Mama and played James Stewart's plucky girlfriend in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 movie Vertigo. But it was as the homespun Miss Ellie in the American series Dallas that Miss Bel Geddes won the devotion of millions worldwide.

From 1978 to 1990, her wistful, enigmatic smiles and level-headed advice made her the Ewings' revered and ineffectual moral compass. She won an Emmy for the role in 1980.

In 1984, she needed time off from the series for heart surgery and was controversially replaced by Donna Reed.

But viewers never accepted the newcomer and Miss Bel Geddes returned to the series in 1985. Miss Reed, for her part, sued the producers and settled out of court.

Miss Bel Geddes was born into a theatrical family in 1922 in New York City.

Her father was the noted theatrical set designer and architect Norman Bel Geddes.

After a private education, she made her stage debut at 18 in a summer stock production of The School for Scandal.

A year later, she was on Broadway in Out of the Frying Pan.

She won the first Clarence Derwent Award - a prize for outstanding young performers - as well as a New York Drama Critics Award for Deep Are the Roots in 1945. She made her movie debut, opposite Henry Fonda and Vincent Price, in The Long Night in 1947.

Other film roles included the 1948 western Blood on the Moon, Caught in 1949 and Panic in the Streets in 1950.

Following her testimony before the Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, she had no work in Hollywood until Hitchcock cast her in Vertigo.

Her first marriage to engineer Carl Schreuer lasted from 1944 to

1951. She was married to Broadway director Windsor Lewis from 1951 until his death in 1972.

She died on Monday at her home in Maine and is survived by two daughters, Susan and Betsy.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in