Barbara Bel Geddes' piquant charm and distinctive line deliveries made her a leading light of the Broadway stage and, late in her career, a television favorite as the matriarch of the long-running CBS drama Dallas. Although she never quite clicked as a movie star, she delivered some excellent performances in films and won an Oscar® nomination as Best Supporting Actress for a particularly memorable role in I Remember Mama (1948).

The daughter of the noted stage and industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes, she was born in New York City in 1922 and began her career as a stage actress at the age of 18. An award-winning performance on Broadway in Deep Are the Roots (1946) established her as a major talent, and she went on to originate starring roles in such noted productions as The Moon Is Blue (1954), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), The Sleeping Prince (1959) and Mary, Mary (1961). In each case, the plum part in the film version was assigned to someone else.

Bel Geddes' own film debut came in a leading role as the innocent love interest of suspected murderer Henry Fonda in the noir-styled thriller The Long Night (1947), directed by Anatole Litvak. She earned excellent notices and immediately was cast as Katrin, the daughter who narrates I Remember Mama; working beautifully with Irene Dunne as Mama, she delivers a performance of great skill and warmth.

Other good roles for top filmmakers followed in Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon (1948), Max Ophuls' Caught (1949) and Elia Kazan's Panic in the Streets (1950). In the suspenseful Fourteen Hours (1951), Bel Geddes has the female lead as the girlfriend of a man (Richard Basehart) who's threatening to throw himself from the window of a tall building. (Grace Kelly made her film debut in a supporting role.)

Because of the demands of her stage career and a brush with the House Un-American Activities Committee, Bel Geddes appeared infrequently on the big screen during the later 1950s. She kept busy on television, however, appearing in numerous dramatic series including four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock's Presents -- most notably as a woman who murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb in Lamb to the Slaughter (1958). That same year she took a supporting role in Hitchcock's Vertigo, leaving some viewers to wonder why James Stewart would have left her warm-blooded character for an affair with the frosty Kim Novak.

Bel Geddes played "Miss Ellie" on Dallas from 1978 to 1990, winning an Emmy Award as Best Actress for the 1979-80 season. After heart surgery in 1983 she retired temporarily from the show and was replaced by Donna Reed during the 1984-85 season, but returned the following season. Also an artist, author of children's books and greeting-card designer, Bel Geddes was married twice and had two daughters. She died of lung cancer in 2005.

by Roger Fristoe