Sunday, October 17, 2010

BARBARA BILLINGSLEY PASSES

 

Barbara Billingsley

Barbara Billingsley, who as June Cleaver on the fondly remembered television series "Leave It to Beaver" personified a Hollywood postwar family ideal - the ever-sweet, ever-helpful suburban stay-at-home mom - died Saturday. She was 94.

A family spokeswoman, Judy Twersky, said that Ms. Billingsley had died of polymyalgia, a rheumatoid disease, at her home in Santa Monica, California.

From 1957 to 1963 and in decades of reruns, the glamorous June, who wore pearls and high heels at home, could be counted on to help her husband, Ward (Hugh Beaumont), get their son Theodore, better known as Beaver (Jerry Mathers), and his older brother, Wally (Tony Dow), extricated from innumerable minor jams, from an alligator in the basement to a horse in the garage.

In 1983 she reprised her role as June in a television movie, "Still the Beaver," which reunited her with many members of the original "Leave It to Beaver" cast (but not Hugh Beaumont, who died in 1982). That led to a cable series known first by that name and then as "The New Leave It to Beaver." She also had a small part in the 1997 feature-film version of "Leave It to Beaver."

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