Barbara Bel Geddes Passes away at the age of 82
Barbara Bel Geddes -- formidable actress known for 'Dallas'
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
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Barbara Bel Geddes, the genteel stage and screen actress best known as Miss Ellie, the forbearing matriarch on the 1970s and '80s television series "Dallas," died Monday at her home in Northeast Harbor, Maine.
The cause of death was lung cancer, according to her second cousin, Lewis Bennett, of San Francisco. She was 82.
Long before sighing through the misdeeds of her Texas brood at TV's fictional South Fork, Miss Bel Geddes originated the role of Maggie, the caustic, sexually starved wife in Tennessee Williams' 1955 Broadway play "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." She earned an Oscar nomination for the 1948 film "I Remember Mama" and played James Stewart's plucky girlfriend in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 "Vertigo." In a memorable 1958 episode of TV's "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," Miss Bel Geddes played a housewife who murders her unfaithful husband with a frozen leg of lamb, roasts the murder weapon and serves it to the detectives.
She 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. Educated at private schools, she made her stage debut at 18, in a summer-stock production of "The School for Scandal." A year later, Miss Bel Geddes 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" (1945).
Miss Bel Geddes made her feature film debut, opposite Henry Fonda and Vincent Price, in the "The Long Night" (1947). She gained wider acclaim as the daughter-narrator of "I Remember Mama," the memoir of a Norwegian immigrant family living in San Francisco. Other film roles include the 1948 Western "Blood on the Moon," "Caught" (1949) and "Panic in the Streets" (1950). Following her testimony before the McCarthy-era House Un-American Activities Committee, Miss Bel Geddes found no work in Hollywood until Hitchcock cast her in "Vertigo."
She overcame Tennessee Williams' misgivings about her appearance to win the role of Maggie in "Cat," according to her cousin Bennett. "He (Williams) told her she was too homespun," said Bennett. "But (director Elia) Kazan said that since everyone in this play is so horrible, we need someone people can relate to."
It was that quality of warm, grounded likability that Miss Bel Geddes brought to Miss Ellie, the "Dallas" role she originated in 1978. For the years she played the part, Miss Bel Geddes may have been the most famous and long- suffering public mother in America. With her wistful, enigmatic smiles and level-headed advice about all things dysfunctional, her Miss Ellie was the Ewing family's revered and ineffectual moral compass. She won an Emmy in 1980.
Miss Bel Geddes became embroiled in an offscreen soap opera plot after Donna Reed replaced her as Miss Ellie in 1984. Miss Bel Geddes had withdrawn to have heart surgery. Viewers never accepted Reed in the role. When Miss Bel Geddes returned to the series in 1985, Reed sued the producers and settled out of court. Miss Bel Geddes played Miss Ellie until 1990 but acted very little over the last 15 years of her life.
Bennett remembered his cousin as a modest, nature-loving woman who "loved ducks and geese and ravens. She got after me once when I complained about the pigeons."
Miss Bel Geddes was married twice, first to engineer Carl Schreuer, from 1944-51, and then to Broadway director Windsor Lewis, from 1951 until his death in 1972. She is survived by two daughters, Susan and Betsy.
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I know she was in her 80's but it still comes as a shock. At least I know she will live on forever on forever in her movies and as Miss Ellie on Dallas in the reruns and DVD's.
Originally Posted by R.B
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