August 10, 2005

Barbara Bel Geddes, 1922 - 2005.

Barbara Bel Geddes
Barbara Bel Geddes, the winsome actress who rose to stage and movie stardom but reached her greatest fame as Miss Ellie Ewing in the long-running TV series Dallas, has died. She was 82.

The AP.

Long before sighing through the misdeeds of her Texas brood at TV's fictional South Fork, Miss Bel Geddes originated the role of Maggie, the caustic, sexually starved wife in Tennessee Williams's 1955 Broadway play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. She earned an Oscar nomination for the 1948 film I Remember Mama and played James Stewart's plucky girlfriend in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 Vertigo. In a memorable 1958 episode of TV's Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Miss Bel Geddes played a housewife who murders her unfaithful husband with a frozen leg of lamb, roasts the murder weapon and serves it to the detectives.

Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted by dwhudson at August 10, 2005 2:49 PM

Comments

She was also the first woman to say "pregnant" on the American stage.

More on Bel Geddes here:

http://www.edrants.com/?p=1371

Posted by: ed at August 10, 2005 3:43 PM

Ed, I've had similar thoughts about the limitations of what's out there on the Net over and again (and, FWIW, like you, once even in the specific case of Sally Cruikshank). Used to, of course, we'd go to the library, but that's not exactly relevant to your excellent point. And I agree: "I would suggest that bloggers and online enthusiasts have a duty to reference the people they love and back up their findings with links and citations. Because if we don't keep these people alive, then who will?"

I think that, to an extent, that's happening. Maybe not as fast as we'd like; maybe there's also too much overall emphasis on the here and now in the vast majority of the gadzillion blogs going up each day. But the Wikipedia has been a major leap in the right direction. I wonder if contributing to it, filling some of those "cracks of posterity" you mention, might be worked into the curriculum at public schools?

Posted by: David Hudson at August 11, 2005 3:28 AM

I just feel guilty that we, or at least I, often don't "blog about" these people we adore until they pass away. I would have like to honor Bel Geddes, and many, many others, while they were still with us, but for some reason take them for granted until they are taken from us. Maybe we should think about some people who are still around and deserve a salute of some kind...

C

Posted by: Craig at August 11, 2005 8:38 AM