Friday, July 8, 2011

Barbara Billingsley's Biography!







Barbara Lillian Combes; known professionally as: Barbara Billingsley (December 22, 1915  – October 16, 2010) was a prolific American film, television, voice and character actress of stage, who in her five decades of television came to prominence in the 1950s in the big screen in The Careless Years opposite Natalie Trundy, before she was 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. She also had a small role as Lady Jive on Airplane!.


Early life

Billingsley was born Barbara Lillian Combes in Los Angeles, California, the daughter of Robert Collyer Combes, who was the Chief of Police and Lillian A. (née McLaughlin) Combes, who worked in a factory. She's the youngest of three children. When she was a little girl, her mother would often take her to the many movies, both she and her mother had watched, without comedy, hence, her mother was a drama buff. Her parents divorced while Barbara was an adolescent. When she was in second grade, Billingsley already fell in love with drama immediately. Billingsley was a popular student at Los Angeles's, George Washington High School (now Washington Prepatory High School, an almost all-black high school), where she fell in love with all the school plays. There, Billingsley was also voted Class Queen, being the most popular student in class. She graduated from George Washington in 1934, just before she went on her first airplane ride, where she paid $2.00 for her first trip. 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. She also landed a contract with MGM Studios in 1945. While in one of William Self's plays, she followed then future governor later president Ronald Reagan, after co-starring in one of her plays.


Career

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, Three Guys Named Mike, opposite Jane Wyman, 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. She co-starred opposite Dean Stockwell and Natalie Trundy in The Careless Years, which was her first and only large role in the movies.


Premier character actress

Since 1952, Billingsley made her first guest-starring role on an episode of The Abbott and Costello Show. The part led to other roles such as, The Lone Wolf, 2 episodes of City Detective, The Pride of the Family, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars, Letter to Loretta, General Electric Summer Originals, You Are There, Cavalcade of America, Panic!, Mr. Adams and Eve, The Love Boat, Silver Spoons, Parker Lewis Can't Lose, Mike Hammer, Empty Nest, among many others. She reprised her June Cleaver role 3 times, in Amazing Stories, Baby Boom and Roseanne. She also guest-starred on an episode of Make Room For Daddy, which she played the character of Danny Thomas's TV date, which producers strongly thought they would cast her as his second wife, when they decided against her role.


TV series

Leave it To Beaver

After Billingsley signed a contract with Universal Studios in 1957, she made her mark on TV as everyday mother June Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, which proved to be the answer to other 1950s TV family sitcoms such as: Father Knows Best, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Make Room For Daddy and The Donna Reed Show. It debuted on ABC in 1957, to mediocre ratings and was soon cancelled. However, the show had a future, as it moved to CBS, the following year, and stayed there for the next five seasons, plus the show was featured in over 100 countries.

Also starring on Beaver were the late American prolific character actor of stage, film and television, Hugh Beaumont in the role of Ward Cleaver, as June's husband and the kids' father, as well as two unfamiliar child character actors of stage and film, Tony Dow in the role of Wally Cleaver and Jerry Mathers as Theodore "Beaver" Cleaver. All the actors got along real-well on-camera as well as off-camera with Billingsley, esp. Mathers, for the show's six seasons, from 1957-1963. In addition, Mathers once said in an interview that he cherished Barbara's real-life family, so much, when the show was on.

The Cleaver household became iconic in its representation of an archetypal suburban lifestyle associated with 1950s America. Though it never made a place in the Top 30 or that the show was not a ratings winner over the years, Beaver gain a strong fan base and a loyal following close to the characters viewers could identify with, which also set the tone for later highly-rated family sitcoms. 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 her.[2] The sitcom proved to be very lucrative for Billingsley.

Over the years, the show focused on the more controversial subjects like: alcoholism, divorce, peer pressure, dating, bullying, bad influence, responsibility, friends, lying, stealing, winning, cheating, housecleaning, among many others.
After six seasons and 234 episodes, the still-popular first-run Beaver series was finally canceled due to Billingsley and the rest of her castmates wanting to move on to other projects, esp. Mathers' retirement from acting to enter his freshman year in high school. After cancelation, the show became immensely popular in reruns, in-between syndication and TV Land, thanks to younger and newer fans who grew up watching Leave It to Beaver over the years, or have discovered it for the first time.

Jerry Mathers, who played "The Beaver" for all six seasons, who also appeared in all 234 episodes, said in a 2009 interview on Galesburg.com-blog of how Billingsley was on the show was obviously something most young children of the era have ever heard, “Barbara Billingsley, who was my TV mom June, is as nice in person as she appeared on the show.” Then he said about her smoking, “Barbara was a smoker when ‘Leave it to Beaver’ first started, but she quit because she didn't think it was right that the perfect mother smoked.” Later, in a 2008 interview with Julia Diana Alexander all about the Salute to TV Moms was when Billingsley was teaching young Jerry some appropriate manners was: “Well, you know, Barbara was very much on manners, so she taught me a lot of manners. I was always a rambunctious little boy, and so when we go places [a lot of times], she would walk [of course, as a lady] very slowly, and I would sometimes try to dash ahead of her, and she would always grab me by the little hairs right there in the back of my neck, and she would say, ‘Ladies first!’ And I would always say, ‘OK, oh, but I wanted to make sure nobody was going to hurt you, you know?’ No, no! She said, ‘Ladies first!’, and she pulled me back. She had a way of teaching manners that stuck with you.” Jerry also said about the difference between the TV and the real-life families: “You know what, it wasn’t always people always think because people have seen her and we had that kind of relationship, and it’s not that I don’t love Barbara very much; but I know she had 2 sons and a husband, and I would go home --- I had a mother and father, so she was more to me like a mentor or your very faithful teacher that you got to go and see everyday. As I said, we had wonderful times together. But I knew that she had a family, and that I had a family. It wasn’t truly like she was my mother, but more like a wonderful person to know, and as I’ve said, I’e loved her all my life.” Also, Mathers said about his series' lead that he truly adores, on Leave It to Beaver, when Barbara was just one of those people who would be like a mother to him: "Barbara Billingsley has always been great. Barbara Billingsley is one of my favorite people, and she knows it." Mathers said of his on- and off-screen chemistry with Billingsley: "Well, we've always been very, very good friends. So it... She's a joy to work with." The last thing Jerry said of his childhood television heroine was like a mentor, second-mother and even a close professional friend to work with thinking he was afraid to stay with Barbara: "No, I'm afraid that I never did. As I say, Barbara was always, though, a true role model for me. She was a great actress. And a lot of people, you know, when they see her talk jive talk, they always go she can do other things besides be a mom on Leave It to Beaver. And I tell them, Airplane (1980), she's been a great comedian all her life. And in a lot of ways, just like All in the Family, we kind of stifled her, because her true talent didn't really come out in Leave it To Beaver. She was like the straight woman, but she has an awful lot of talent." After the show's cancelation and years before her death, Mathers has constantly remained a close friend of Billingsley's for over 45 years (and certainly, Tony Dow - who played Beaver's brother's - frequently), when he wasn't just concentrating on his studies in high school, he would occasionally visit Billingsley's real-life family's house and restaurant where he would occasionally hang out. After he graduated from high school at 18 1/2, he entered into the Air National Guard, and would be the subject of urban legend that reports falsely indicated that he would die in Vietnam, when in actuality he was reported to be alive in well. Then he went to college and graduated in 1973, and years later, got married (for the next 2 decades) and began to have his own family. William's (Barbara’s real-life 2nd husband’s) death in 1981, cemented the friendship between Billingsley & Mathers real closer, as Mathers felt so shocked about the second long-running marriage that Barbara had personally enjoyed. A few years after his mentor's husband's death, he came back to work on a revival of the Leave It to Beaver show called, The New Leave It to Beaver, which was popular on TBS (later) Disney Channel, before cancelation in 1989. 18 years after the second-run of the show's cancelation, long after he was diagnosed with diabetes, he was reunited with Billingsley, Dow, Frank Bank and Ken Osmond, to celebrate the show's 50th Anniversary.


After Beaver

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 Robin Williams and Pam Dawber in a 1982 episode of Mork & Mindy. 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.

 

2000-2010

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

On October 4, 2007, she alongside surviving castmates, Jerry Mathers, Tony Dow, Ken Osmond and Frank Bank were all reunited together to appear on ABC's Good Morning America, to celebrate Leave It to Beaver's 50th Anniversary, which became extremely popular in reruns in over 140 countries. Together, they shared some laughter, love and traditional family values that made the show a success of the 1950s and 1960s. According to interviewer Tom Bergeron, both of Billingsley's co-stars, Mathers & Osmond currently get financial advice from another co-star, Bank. 2 days, after the reunion, TV Land reran all the 234 episodes of Leave it To Beaver, in honor of the show's anniversary, which made it a true legend.


Health
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

She and her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, a successful restaurateur, had two sons, Drew (b. 1941) and Glenn, Jr. (b. 1944). Since 1974, Drew and Glenn Jr. 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 was 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.

Her son, Glenn, Jr. is currently married to Karen Zappas, since 1976, where they have 3 children, Logan, Morgan and Taylor. Her other son, Drew has a son, Drew Jr. (all of whom are Barbara's grandchildren).

Her hobbies included: tennis, listening to radio, watching dramatic (before comedy) movies, traveling, drinking wine, sewing, spending time with family, gardening and dining. She was a frequent poker player with Rod Serling, whom Billingsley was a good friend to until his death in 1975.


Personal Quotes:

Barbara: "Husband Roy died on a Saturday, while we were gardening. The Thursday before, I was up for the part of the mother in a series Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher were working on. Then Roy died, and nothing came of that series. But two months later, when they started on Leave It To Beaver, they remembered me and asked me to read for the part of June. I've always thought that they felt sorry for me." (Source: USIMDB.com)

Barbara: “June Cleaver didn't keep her house in perfect order, the prop man did it.” (Source: USIMDB.com)

Barbara when she auditioned for June Cleaver: "Well, I was doing the script, and I don't think I could have changed it. But I loved it." (Source: CBS.com)

Barbara when asked if there was the difference between her and the June Cleaver character: "My sons say, no. Gradually what happened is the writer started writing about you, as well as the character they created originally. So you all become mixed up." (Source: CBS.com)

Barbara when starring on Leave It To Beaver: "They were always good kids. Tony had an exhibit of his artwork and sold 18 pieces. Pretty darn good, isn't it?" (Source: USAToday.com)

Barbara on her on- and off-camera relationship with Jerry Mathers who played The Beaver: "Jerry told me it had been a dream of his always to be able to go to New York and be in a Broadway show. So all we have to do is decide what we want to do. You have to have a dream." (Source: USAToday.com)

Barbara who said in 2007, when she was the only actress to reprise her role as June Cleaver, in 1982, when both her co-stars didn't want to be involved with the series, a second time: "Tony and Jerry didn't want to be in it. They were crazy. But it really didn't turn out very good." (Source: USAToday.com)

Barbara who said of Hugh Beaumont: "And he was the greatest father I think on television, and I was a pretty good mama, I hope." (Source: ABC.com)

Barbara on her Airplane! role: "Sure I can talk jive. 'Hang in there, Blood! You're going to catch up on the rebound on the man's side." (Source: ABC.com)

Barbara on wearing her signature pearls: "Oh, I always had to wear those. I always had something around my neck cause I have a hollow there, and it was hard in those days to photograph it. Hollow, in my neck, I wear pearls, all the time." (Source: ABC.com)

Barbara who said in 2010 about the legacy of her character: “June Cleaver has always been a part of my life and always will be.” (Source: NationalEnquirer.com)

Death


Billingsley died in Santa Monica, California on October 16, 2010, two months before her 95th birthday. She had been suffering from polymyalgia, a rheumatoid ailment. She is survived by her two sons and four grandchildren.

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)

[edit] Television shows

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

  1. ^ Good Morning America, ABC, October 2007
  2. ^ Mathers, Jerry. ...And Jerry Mathers a "The Beaver". Berkley Boulevard Books, 1998.


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