Barbara Bel Geddes, 82; Star of Stage, Screen and ‘Dallas’
LA Times
Barbara Bel Geddes, a stage and screen actress who found lasting fame as the saintly matriarch on the long-running TV series “Dallas,” has died. She was 82.
Bel Geddes, a longtime smoker, died Monday of lung cancer at her home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, a relative told the San Francisco Chronicle.
She decided to take the role of Eleanor Southworth “Miss Ellie” Ewing on the CBS drama that ran from 1978 to 1991 because she was “flat broke” after spending six years caring for her second husband, who died of cancer in 1972.
“She was the glue that held the ship together there,” Larry Hagman, who played her son J.R. on “Dallas,” said Wednesday. “She was a wonderful woman — great to work with, great to direct.”
In 1980, she won an Emmy for her portrayal of the long-suffering mother who was the moral compass of the famously dysfunctional Ewings.
Appearing on the series was “great fun,” Bel Geddes said in 1982, but sometimes the story lines struck too close to home.
When Jim Davis, who played husband Jock Ewing, died in 1981, “it was like losing her own husband again,” “Dallas” producer Leonard Katzman told the Associated Press. “It was a terribly difficult and emotional time for Barbara.”
During the second season, Miss Ellie had a mastectomy, which mirrored Bel Geddes’ breast cancer experience in the early 1970s.
“I guess I dreaded dredging up the whole thing again,” Bel Geddes told The Times in 1979. But she made herself available for interviews to educate women about the importance of self-examination.
The actress with the warm smile found it amusing that she was often cast to play “well-bred ladies.”
“I’m not very well-bred, and I’m not much of a lady,” she told People magazine in 1982. She often cited a story about getting kicked out of Vermont’s Putney School at 16 for being a “disturbing influence” — she kissed boys.
