Stick a Southfork in Her

Barbara Bel Geddes, best known as the matriarch of one of TV’s most dysfunctional families, has died at the age of 82. Bel Geddes was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1948 for “I Remember Mama” and was the original Maggie the Cat in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” on Broadway, but she was immortalized as Eleanor Southworth Ewing Farlow, daughter of a successful rancher who married a Texas oil wildcatter and raised a pansy, a bastard and a running back on the family ranch on Dallas. As Miss Ellie for all but two seasons – one missed following a massive heart attack, one missed as the show careened into self-parody – Bel Geddes’ brought light humor, sass and decency to balance J.R.’s evil machinations. She won the only Emmy in the show’s 13-year run and the only acting Emmy ever won by a nighttime soap actor the season that Miss Ellie had a mastectomy, drawing on her real-life experiences from a decade prior. In the early days of her career Bel Geddes also had a good relationship with Alfred Hitchcock, appearing in“Vertigo,” and several episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” most notably as the murderess who clubs her husband to death with a leg of lamb, then serves it to the police investigating his death.