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The Telegraph (12/Aug/2005) - Obituary: Barbara Bel Geddes

(c) Telegraph (12/Aug/2005)

Barbara Bel Geddes

Barbara Bel Geddes, who died on Monday aged 82, was hailed as one of America's most promising actresses on stage and screen in the 1940s, but became best known later in life for her role as Miss Ellie in the television soap opera Dallas.

Miss Ellie was the matriarch of the Ewing family (her husband Jock had founded Ewing Oil), presiding over television's most dysfunctional family at their sprawling Texan ranch, Southfork. While her amoral son JR schemed against his more wholesome brother Bobby, and the Ewings conducted a relentless feud with the Barnes family, Miss Ellie strove to preserve her air of weary patience and her loving smile; the diminutive Barbara Bel Geddes - she stood only 5 ft 3½ in tall - made her character the paradigm of long-suffering motherhood, and won an Emmy in 1980.

"Miss Ellie loved her boys," Barbara Bel Geddes said in an interview. "Bobby [Patrick Duffy] was special to her - a favourite - with Gary Ewing the black sheep and the wonderfully ruthless and so very often heartless JR her mainstay, but who gave Miss Ellie the most sleepless nights."

Dallas was first screened in 1978 and ran until 1991. The episode in which JR was shot attracted an audience of 25 million when it was screened by the BBC in 1980. Barbara Bel Geddes had actually abandoned showbusiness 10 years before the series began in order to look after her second husband, Windsor Lewis, who had contracted cancer; but after his death in 1972 she began to experience financial difficulties, and she agreed to play Miss Ellie in order to make some money, thinking that the show would run for no more than one season.

In the event, she remained in the role until the end, bar a year (1984) when she was forced to leave in order to undergo heart surgery. Never ones to allow verisimilitude to get in the way of a good story, the programme-makers simply replaced her for the duration with another actress, Donna Reed.

"I never believed Dallas would become the hit it was," Barbara Bel Geddes said in 1990. "While I'm happy it was a success financially and career-wise for the young actors, I was hopelessly typecast from then on, which really put an end to my career outside the show." This was perhaps unfortunate for a woman who had been considered a consummate actress in her early years in the profession.

Barbara Bel Geddes was born in New York City on October 31 1922, the younger daughter of the theatrical designer and architect Norman Bel Geddes. When Barbara was 16 her mother died, and she was sent to the progressive Putney School in Vermont, where she appeared in a production of Synge's Riders to the Sea. Her drama teacher was unimpressed by her performance, and told her father that her ambitions to go on to the stage should be discouraged. Norman Geddes took no notice of this judgment, and immediately found his daughter a summer job at a theatre in Connecticut.

Barbara later said of her father: "He was the one who got me my first chance in the theatre. He did it because it was the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world, but after that I was on my own."

Her first role was a walk-on part in School for Scandal, a production which starred Ethel Barrymore. She then appeared as Amy in Little Women, before picking up her education in the autumn of 1940 at Andebrook School, Tarrytown, New York. In the event she left school for good a term early to make her Broadway debut, in February 1941, as the ingénue Dottie Colburn in Out of the Frying Pan, one reviewer noting that she was "plump, pleasing and amusing".

When America joined the Second World War, Barbara Bel Geddes toured the country in a production of Junior Miss. In October 1942 she was back in New York in Little Darling. More stage roles followed before, in August 1945, she opened in Philadelphia in Deep Are The Roots. The previous year she had married an electrical engineer, Carl Schreuer, who was instructed by the play's producers to hide the reviews from her in case they were unfavourable; in the event, the local newspaper judged her performance "utterly brilliant".

The play was equally successful when it moved to New York, one critic stating that, in 40 years' reviewing, he had not seen her equal. She duly won a Clarence Derwent award for her performance. By this time, however, Barbara Bel Geddes had her sights set on the big screen.

In April 1946 she signed a seven-year contract with RKO Radio Studios, and her first picture was Anatole Litvak's The Long Night (1947) - a re-make of Le jour se lève - in which she co-starred with Henry Fonda. Again she attracted enthusiastic notices, one critic proclaiming: "The movie-makers have not tried to give 'glamour' to Miss Bel Geddes with long, false eyelashes and a mouth overladen with rouge. They have left her natural personality and it comes through very well. Miss Bel Geddes has vitality and spirit and freshness and appeal."

She won an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for her second film, I Remember Mama (1948), a George Stevens melodrama about a Norwegian immigrant family in San Francisco at the beginning of the 20th century. This was followed by a western with Robert Mitchum, Blood on the Moon (also 1948), and she took the female lead opposite Richard Widmark in the gritty thriller Panic in the Streets (1950).

In 1958 Barbara Bel Geddes played "Midge", the jealous girlfriend of Scottie (James Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Appearing throughout in spectacles, she was a fashion artist who drew brassières designed on the cantilever principle. She again worked with James Stewart in The Five Pennies (1959), the story of "Red" Nichols, a cornet-playing country boy who goes to New York in the 1920s full of musical ambition and becomes a big star.

Barbara Bel Geddes did not, however, abandon the stage; in 1958 she was a success on Broadway in the role of Maggie in the first production of Tennessee Williams's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

In 1960 she made the war adventure picture Five Branded Women with Jeanne Moreau and Vera Miles; she played George Hamilton's mother in By Love Possessed (1961), starring Lana Turner; and on television she became a regular on Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Dr Kildare.

Barbara Bel Geddes retired for good after Dallas came to an end in 1991, returning to the public eye only once, in 1997, to talk about the show on a documentary. She went to live in rural seclusion in Maine, and turned her attention to oil-painting, writing children's books and designing stationery. Although her income from Dallas should have been enough to leave her financially secure, a $9 million lawsuit against her agent forced her to file for bankruptcy.

Barbara Bel Geddes's marriage to Carl Schreuer, with whom she had a daughter, was dissolved in 1951. She had a second daughter with Windsor Lewis, and both children survive her.

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