Actress Barbara Billingsley, who played the quintessential suburban US mom on the 1957 to 1963 US television comedy Leave It to Beaver, died on Saturday at age 94.
A spokesman for the Santa Monica, California, care facility where Billingsley died said the actress, who had a memorable cameo as a jive-talking elderly passenger in the 1980 hit comedy film Airplane! had been in poor health in recent years.
In her signature role as June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver, which ran for six seasons, Billingsley personified the ideal middle-class mother and housewife in an era when relatively few middle-class US women with children worked outside the home.
Stylish
Ever patient with the family’s rambunctious younger son, nicknamed Beaver, played by Jerry Mathers, and their teenage son, Wally (Tony Dow), June Cleaver was always impeccably stylish, often seen doing household chores in pearls and earrings.
Her TV husband, Ward Cleaver, was played by Hugh Beaumont, who died in 1982.
The show aired first on CBS, then on ABC. Reruns are still shown widely in syndication almost half a century after the program went off the air.
Billingsley reprised her June Cleaver role in several revivals and TV movie updates of the original show that aired into the 1990s.
She complained at times that her association with the character left her forever typecast in Hollywood as the perfect mother.
‘I speak jive’
It was an image she used to comic effect in Airplane! as an elderly passenger who offers to have a word with two upset African-Americans speaking in heavy street slang on the plane after she politely tells the flight attendant: “Oh, stewardess, I speak jive.”
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