Dallas actress dies
2005-08-11 07:36
Los Angeles - US actress Barbara Bel Geddes, best known as Ewing family matriarch Miss Ellie in the legendary television soap opera Dallas, has died at the age of 82, funeral directors said on Wednesday.
"I can confirm that Miss Bel Geddes has died," an official at the Jordan-Fernald Funeral Home in Mount Desert, in the eastern US state of Maine, told AFP on condition of anonymity.
"The family has asked that we do not give out any further details," the source added.
Oscar-nominated Bel Geddes became world famous through her role as the mother of Texas oil barons JR and Bobby Ewing - played by Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy - in Dallas, which ran from 1978 to 1991.
She won television's highest honour, an Emmy Award, for best actress in 1980 and was nominated in the same category in 1979 and 1981. She left the show for health reasons in 1985.
In the series, the empathetic Eleanor Ewing was married twice, first to Ewing patriarch Jock Ewing, played by the late Jim Davis, and then to Clayton Farlow, played by former musical star Howard Keel.
She played the mother in law of Ewing women Pamela, played by Victoria Principal, and the volatile wife of JR, Sue Ellen, played by actress Linda Gray.
Accomplished stage and screen actress
But while she will be best remembered as the oil family matriarch, Bel Geddes was an accomplished stage and screen actress long before Dallas, the soap opera that made television history by becoming a global phenomenon.
She won an Academy Award nod for best supporting actress in 1948's I Remember Mama and also starred in Panic in the Streets (1950) directed by Elia Kazan; and in Alfred Hitchcock's classic mystery thriller Vertigo in 1958.
The actress was born in New York City on October 31, 1922 to theatrical designer father Norman Bel Geddes, Bel Geddes made her stage debut at age 18.
Her first movie role came seven years later when she was cast in the 1947 drama The Long Night, starring Henry Fonda.
One year later, she attracted widespread attention for her role as Katrin Hanson in the family drama, I Remember Mama, winning her Oscar nod.
She worked regularly in television in the 1950s and 60s, frequently taking roles in the master of suspense Hitchcock's US television series.
In one episode based on a Roald Dahl story, she memorably played an angry housewife who bludgeons her husband to death with a shank of lamb and then feeds it to policemen investigating the mysterious murder.