Barbara Billingsley, Beaver Cleaver's TV Mom Dies

LOS ANGELES – 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. She was 94.

Billingsley, who had suffered from a rheumatoid disease, died at her home in
Santa Monica, said family spokeswoman Judy Twersky.

When the show debuted in 1957, Jerry Mathers, who played Beaver, was 9, and
Tony Dow, who portrayed Wally, was 12. 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.

Beaver, meanwhile, was a typical American boy whose adventures landed him in
one comical crisis after another.

Billingsley's own two sons said she was pretty much the image of June
Cleaver in real life, although the actress disagreed. She did acknowledge
that she may have become more like June as the series progressed.

"I think what happens is that the writers start writing about you as well as
the character they created," she once said. "So you become sort of all mixed
up, I think."

A wholesome beauty with a lithe figure, Billingsley began acting in her
elementary school's plays and soon discovered she wanted to do nothing else.

Although 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 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.
"A couple of months later I got a call to go to the studio to do this pilot
show. And it was `Beaver.'"

Decades later, she expressed surprise at the lasting affection people had
for the show.

"We knew we were making a good show, because it was so well written," she
said. "But we had no idea what was ahead. People still talk about it and
write letters, telling how much they watch it today with their children and
grandchildren."

After "Leave it to Beaver" left the air in 1963 Billingsley largely
disappeared from public view for several years.

She resurfaced in 1980 in a hilarious cameo in "Airplane!" playing a demur
elderly passenger not unlike June Cleaver.

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.

"No chance they would have cast me for that if I hadn't been June Cleaver,"
she once said.

She returned as June Cleaver in a 1983 TV movie, "Still the Beaver," that
costarred Mathers and Dow and portrayed a much darker side of Beaver's life.

In his mid-30s, Beaver was unemployed, unable to communicate with his own
sons and going through a divorce. Wally, a successful lawyer, was handling
the divorce, and June was at a loss to help her son through the transition.

"Ward, what would you do?" she asked at the site of her husband's grave.
(Beaumont had died in 1982.)

The movie revived interest in the Cleaver family, and the Disney Channel
launched "The New Leave It to Beaver" in 1985.

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.

In 1997 Universal made a "Leave it to Beaver" theatrical film with a new
generation of actors. Billingsley returned for a cameo, however, as Aunt
Martha.

In later years she appeared from time to time in such TV series as "Murphy
Brown," "Empty Nest" and "Baby Boom" and had a memorable comic turn opposite
fellow TV moms June Lockhart of "Lassie" and Isabel Sanford of "The
Jeffersons" on the "Roseanne" show.

"Now some people, they just associate you with that one role (June Cleaver),
and it makes it hard to do other things," she once said. "But as far as I'm
concerned, it's been an honor."

In real life, fate was not as gentle to Billingsley as it had been to June
and her family.

Born Barbara Lillian Combes in Los Angeles on Dec. 22, 1922, she was raised
by her mother after her parents divorced. She and her first husband, Glenn
Billingsley, divorced when her sons were just 2 and 4.

Her second husband, director Roy Kellino, died of a heart attack after three
years of marriage and just months before she landed the "Leave it to Beaver"
role.

She married physician Bill Mortenson in 1959 and they remained wed until his
death in 1981.

Survivors include her sons, three stepchildren and numerous grandchildren.