| Elinor Donahue |
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| 1937 births | |
| living people | |
| american television actors | |
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| vaudeville performers | |
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She was born Mary Eleanor Donahue. Her mother, a theatrical costumer, moonlighted as a department store saleswoman in order to pay for her daughter's dancing lessons. Appearing in dancing-chorus film roles from the age of five, Donahue was at one point a ballet-school classmate of future Fred Astaire partner Barrie Chase. She was a child actor working in Vaudeville who achieved stardom for her role as the elder daughter, Betty, on the popular 1954 – 1960 television family series Father Knows Best . She also appeared in numerous other television shows as a guest actor including Star Trek (second-season episode " Metamorphosis ") and in such Motion Picture s as 1990s '' Pretty Woman ''. She has had roles on many TV shows, including Miriam Welby, Tony Randall's love interest on TV's '' The Odd Couple '', and Hunnicut, the evil nurse on '' Days Of Our Lives ''. Donahue was also featured in several episodes of The Andy Griffith Show as pharmacist Ellie Walker, even getting a mention in the famous opening credits. Walker was intended to be a love interest for Andy Taylor , but was dropped from the cast after Griffith and the producers decided they had no romantic chemistry, and appears only during the first season (1960-1961). She played Gladys, the mother of Chris Peterson ( Chris Elliott ), on the cult sitcom '' Get A Life! '' (1990-1992), alongside Elliott's real-life father, Comedian Bob Elliott t. The widow of TV executive producer Harry Ackerman (he was 25 years her senior), whose list of credits included " Leave It To Beaver ", " Bewitched ", and " Gidget " and a mother of four sons, Elinor lives with her third husband, contractor Louis Genevrino (married since 1992), in California. In 1998 she published a memoir entitled "In the Kitchen with Elinor Donahue" in which she relived some of her memories of Hollywood along with providing more than 150 of her top-grade recipes. EXTERNAL LINKS |
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