12/28/2022 0 Comments Leave it to beaver 1997 castBillingsley returned for a cameo, however, as Aunt Martha. In 1997 Universal made a “Leave it to Beaver” theatrical film with a new generation of actors. The series took a more hopeful view of the Cleavers, with Beaver winning custody of his two sons and all three moving in with June. The movie revived interest in the Cleaver family, and the Disney Channel launched “The New Leave It to Beaver” in 1985. ![]() “Ward, what would you do?” she asked at the site of her husband’s grave. Wally, a successful lawyer, was handling the divorce, and June was at a loss to help her son through the transition. In his mid-30s, Beaver was unemployed, unable to communicate with his own sons and going through a divorce. She returned as June Cleaver in a 1983 TV movie, “Still the Beaver,” that co-starred Mathers and Dow and portrayed a much darker side of Beaver’s life. “No chance they would have cast me for that if I hadn’t been June Cleaver,” she once said. When flight attendants were unable to communicate with a pair of jive-talking hipsters, Billingsley’s character volunteered to translate, saying “I speak jive.” The three then engage in a raucous street-slang conversation. She resurfaced in 1980 in a hilarious cameo in “Airplane!” playing a demur elderly passenger not unlike June Cleaver. People still talk about it and write letters, telling how much they watch it today with their children and grandchildren.”Īfter “Leave it to Beaver” left the air in 1963 Billingsley largely disappeared from public view for several years. “We knew we were making a good show, because it was so well written,” she said. And it was ‘Beaver.’“ĭecades later, she expressed surprise at the lasting affection people had for the show. “A couple of months later I got a call to go to the studio to do this pilot show. “I was going to do another series with Buddy Ebsen for the same producers, but somehow it didn’t materialize,” she told The Associated Press in 1994. ![]() “So you become sort of all mixed up, I think.”Ī wholesome beauty with a lithe figure, Billingsley began acting in her elementary school’s plays and soon discovered she wanted to do nothing else.Īlthough her beauty and figure won her numerous roles in movies from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she failed to obtain star status until “Leave it to Beaver,” a show that she almost passed on. “I think what happens is that the writers start writing about you as well as the character they created,” she once said. She did acknowledge that she may have become more like June as the series progressed. Billingsley’s character, the perfect stay-at-home 1950s mom, was always there to gently but firmly nurture both through the ups and downs of childhood.īeaver, meanwhile, was a typical American boy whose adventures landed him in one comical crisis after another.īillingsley’s own two sons said she was pretty much the image of June Cleaver in real life, although the actress disagreed. When the show debuted in 1957, Jerry Mathers, who played Beaver, was 9, and Tony Dow, who portrayed Wally, was 12. ![]() She was 94.īillingsley, who had suffered from a rheumatoid disease, died at her home in Santa Monica, said family spokeswoman Judy Twersky. SANTA MONICA, CALIF.-Barbara Billingsley, who gained supermom status for her gentle portrayal of June Cleaver, the warm, supportive mother of a pair of precocious boys in “Leave it to Beaver,” died Saturday.
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