Barbara Bel Geddes, 82; Star of Stage, Screen and ‘Dallas’

Barbara Bel Geddes, a stage and screen actress who found lasting fame as the saintly matriarch on the long-running TV series “Dallas,” has died. She was 82.

Bel Geddes, a longtime smoker, died Monday of lung cancer at her home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, a relative told the San Francisco Chronicle.

She decided to take the role of Eleanor Southworth “Miss Ellie” Ewing on the CBS drama that ran from 1978 to 1991 because she was “flat broke” after spending six years caring for her second husband, who died of cancer in 1972.

“She was the glue that held the ship together there,” Larry Hagman, who played her son J.R. on “Dallas,” said Wednesday. “She was a wonderful woman -- great to work with, great to direct.”

In 1980, she won an Emmy for her portrayal of the long-suffering mother who was the moral compass of the famously dysfunctional Ewings.

Appearing on the series was “great fun,” Bel Geddes said in 1982, but sometimes the story lines struck too close to home.

When Jim Davis, who played husband Jock Ewing, died in 1981, “it was like losing her own husband again,” “Dallas” producer Leonard Katzman told the Associated Press. “It was a terribly difficult and emotional time for Barbara.”

During the second season, Miss Ellie had a mastectomy, which mirrored Bel Geddes’ breast cancer experience in the early 1970s.

“I guess I dreaded dredging up the whole thing again,” Bel Geddes told The Times in 1979. But she made herself available for interviews to educate women about the importance of self-examination.

The actress with the warm smile found it amusing that she was often cast to play “well-bred ladies.”

“I’m not very well-bred, and I’m not much of a lady,” she told People magazine in 1982. She often cited a story about getting kicked out of Vermont’s Putney School at 16 for being a “disturbing influence” -- she kissed boys.

Barbara Bel Geddes was born in New York City on Oct. 31, 1922, to Norman Geddes, a noted theatrical stage designer and architect, and Helen Belle Sneider, a former English teacher. Her parents invented the hybrid “Bel-Geddes” as the name of a magazine they were launching. Her father later dropped the hyphen but took the coined name as his own.

After her parents separated when she was 5, she said she didn’t see much of her father but she “absolutely adored him.”

He helped her get her first job in summer stock in Connecticut when she was 16, which led to her first Broadway role as the ingenue in “Out of the Frying Pan.” In 1945, she won the New York Drama Critics’ Award for best actress in the interracial love story “Deep Are the Roots.”

The critic for the Commonweal called her performance a “breath-taking tour not seen hearabouts, I should imagine, since the earliest Helen Hayes.”

Already, her sights were set on Hollywood.

“My ambition is to be a good screen actress,” Bel Geddes told the New York World-Telegram. “I think it would be much more exciting to work for Frank Capra, George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock or Elia Kazan than to stay on Broadway.”

In 1946, she signed a seven-year contract with RKO that contained an unusual clause: She wanted to make only one picture a year. In her first film, she costarred with Henry Fonda and Vincent Price in “The Long Night” (1947), a disappointing remake of a French film.

“Blood on the Moon” (1948) teamed her in a western with Robert Mitchum and attracted the attention of Life magazine, which put her on its cover.

For her third film, she received an Oscar nomination for portraying Irene Dunne’s daughter in “I Remember Mama,” the memoir of a Norwegian family living in San Francisco. Other roles included “Caught” (1949), “Panic in the Streets” (1950) and “Fourteen Hours” (1951).

Looking back, she said, “I went out to California awfully young. I remember Lillian Hellman and Elia Kazan told me, ‘Don’t go, learn your craft.’ But I loved films.”

Howard Hughes, who bought control of RKO in 1948, fired her because he didn’t think she was sexy enough, she said. “I was crushed,” Bel Geddes said. “But thank God he did that, because it meant I went back to the theater.”

Back on Broadway, she appeared in a string of hits and originated the role of Maggie in Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 1955, although the playwright had misgivings about giving her the part because he thought her looks were too “homespun,” a relative told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Her biggest Broadway success came in “Mary, Mary,” a frothy marital comedy by Jean Kerr that opened in 1961 and ran for 1,500 performances.

By then, she had returned to Hollywood to play Midge, the drab girlfriend of James Stewart in 1958’s Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.” But by the early 1960s, she had virtually disappeared from Hollywood. She illustrated two children’s books and designed a line of greeting cards.

After a low-key movie comeback in 1971 in two films, “Summertree” and “The Todd Killings,” Bel Geddes’ next big role was in “Dallas,” which became a runaway hit during the 1980-81 television season.

Bel Geddes also became caught up in an off-screen soap opera when she left “Dallas” to have quadruple-bypass heart surgery and was replaced in 1984 by Donna Reed, who signed a three-year contract. When Bel Geddes returned to the role in 1985, Reed sued the producers and settled out of court.

Bel Geddes left “Dallas” for good in 1990; CBS canceled the series a year later.

Early in her stage career, Bel Geddes was married to electrical engineer Carl Schreuer and had a daughter, Susan. The marriage ended after seven years in 1951. Later that year, she married Broadway director Windsor Lewis and had another daughter, Betsy. Lewis died in 1972. Her daughters survive her.

During the filming of “Dallas,” Bel Geddes rented an apartment in Marina del Rey, but during hiatus returned to the 200-year-old white clapboard farmhouse on 55 acres in upstate New York that she shared with her second husband for 20 years.

“He always said I married him for the farm,” she said in 1982, and laughed.