Actress Barbara Billingsley died 16 October 2010 of polymyaglia (a rheumatoid disease). Born Barbara Lillian Combes on 22 December 1915, in Los Angeles, California, she will be remembered as the impeccable mother June Cleaver on the 1950s series Leave it to Beaver, as well as on its sequel series The New Leave it to Beaver (1984-89, originally titled Still the Beaver). She was nominated for two daytime Emmy Awards (1989 and 1990), for playing the nanny on the animated Muppet Babies.
After attending George Washington High School, she briefly attended Los Angeles Junior College, before leaving to appear in a short-lived Broadway play called Straw Hat. She worked for a time as a fashion model, and then returned to Los Angeles, where she appeared in local plays and then signed a contract with MGM. In the 1940s and early 1950s, she had mostly small film roles, but then she won the role that would define her, and played the perfect suburban housewife (always wearing pearls and high heels) from 1957 to 1963. That role typecast her, and later roles were hard to come by, but her career was revived in 1980, when she played the sweet old lady in Airplane who can speak jive. From then on, she got guest roles, and later revived her most famous character in a successor series.
Her genre roles include: Mysterious Ways (2000), Monsters (1989), Bay Coven (1987), Amazing Stories (1985), Movie Macabre (1984), Mork & Mindy (1982), Invaders from Mars (1953), and Angels in the Outfield (1951).
She was married three times, first to Glenn Billingsley in 1941 (who’s name she took for her stage name); they divorced in 1947. With Billingsley, she had two sons who survive her. She married Roy Kellino in 1953, and he died three years later. Then she married Dr. Will Mortensen in 1959 (he died in 1981).