Barbara Billingsley mini-bio: Barbara Billingsley (born Barbara Lillian Combes on December 22, 1915) is an American film and television actress.
With a year at Los Angeles Junior College behind her, Billingsley traveled to Broadway when Straw Hat, a revue in which she was appearing, attracted enough attention to send it to New York. When, after five days, the show closed, she took an apartment on 57th Street and went to work as a $60-a-week fashion model.
As an actress on the silver screen, she had usually uncredited roles in major motion picture productions in the 1940s. These roles continued into the first half of the 1950s (The Bad and the Beautiful) and led to lead roles on the sitcoms Professional Father and The Brothers.
She is best known for her role as the archetypal, suburban housewife and mother June Cleaver in the sitcom Leave It to Beaver. The Cleaver household became iconic in its representation of a rather bland, suburban lifestyle associated with 1950s America. Billingsley, who could often be seen doing household chores wearing pearls and earrings, was especially singled out. The show ran from 1957 to 1963 and proved to be very lucrative for Billingsley.
When production of the show ended in 1963, however, Billingsley was typecast as saccharine sweet, and had trouble obtaining acting jobs for years. She traveled extensively abroad until the late 1970s, and then, after an absence of 17 years from the public eye (other than appearing in two episodes of The F.B.I. in 1971), she appeared in the movie Airplane! (1980), as a passenger who could speak jive.
She was the voice of "Nanny" on Muppet Babies from 1984 to 1991.
Billingsley appeared in a Leave It to Beaver reunion television movie entitled Still the Beaver in 1983, a year after her on-screen husband during the six-year original run of the series, Hugh Beaumont, died of a heart attack. She also appeared in the subsequent revival television series, The New Leave It to Beaver (1985-1989). In the 1997 film version of Leave It to Beaver, Billingsley played the character "Aunt Martha".
In 2007, Billingsley completed a role on My Name Is Earl.
Billingsley was born in Los Angeles, California. She and her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, a successful restaurateur, had two sons, Drew and Glenn, Jr. Since 1974, Drew and Glenn have owned and operated Billingsley's Restaurant in West Los Angeles, in the tradition of their father, and their great uncle, Sherman Billingsley, founder of New York City's very fashionable 1940s-era nightclub, The Stork Club. Billingsley divorced Glenn Billingsley, but kept his surname professionally, and later married Roy Kellino, a director. After Kellino's death, she married Dr. William Mortenson.
Billingsley is related by marriage to actor/producer Peter Billingsley, known for his starring role as Ralphie in the seasonal classic A Christmas Story. First husband Glenn's cousin is Peter's mother, Gail Billingsley.
Today, Billingsley resides in Santa Monica, California. She is a proud grandmother of four
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