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Unforgettable Guest Stars
The cast of Star Trek was usually supplemented by visiting actors brought in to portray incidental crew members as well as the friends, enemies, and love interests Captain Kirk and company encountered from week to week. Although a handful of episodes—including “Mirror, Mirror” and “The Tholian Web,” among other notable exceptions—were produced without benefit of outside talent, most featured guest stars in prominent roles and were stronger for it. This was due in part to the generally high caliber of talent that casting director Joe D’Agosta was able to bring to Star Trek.
D’Agosta secured the services of numerous distinguished actors who were well known to television viewers of the era. James Gregory, who guest starred in “Dagger of the Mind,” had played the title role in director John Frankenheimer’s classic political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Elisha Cook Jr., who defends Captain Kirk in “Court Martial,” was a Hollywood veteran who had roughed up Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941). And four regulars from the highly rated Batman TV show beamed aboard the Enterprise: Frank (the Riddler) Gorshin in “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” Lee (Catwoman) Meriwether in “That Which Survives,” Julie (Catwoman) Newmar in “Friday’s Child,” and Yvonne (Batgirl) Craig in “Whom Gods Destroy.”
Other Trek guest stars were little recognized at the time but won distinction later. Kim Darby, who played the title role in “Miri,” would ride alongside John Wayne in his Oscar-winning True Grit (1969). John Fiedler, who scared the wits out of the Enterprise crew in “Wolf in the Fold,” would gain immortality as the voice of Piglet in Walt Disney’s Winnie the Pooh cartoons. And Sally Kellerman (from “Where No Man Has Gone Before”), Michael J. Pollard (“Miri”), and Teri Garr (“Assignment: Earth”) would later earn Academy Award nominations for their respective roles in M*A*S*H (1970), Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and Tootsie (1982). A half-dozen other Star Trek guest stars went on to earn Emmy nominations. That esteemed group includes Diana Muldaur, twice nominated for her work as ruthless attorney Rosalind Shays on L.A. Law, who was so impressive in two classic Trek appearances (“Return to Tomorrow” and “Is There in Truth No Beauty?”) that she replaced Gates McFadden as chief medical officer for a season of The Next Generation.
Among these gifted actors are several who, regardless of any other success they may have enjoyed, remain forever linked with Star Trek by the indelible performances they contributed to the series. The following actors created characters that have captured the hearts and imaginations of generations of fans.
Michael Ansara
As Kang, the fierce yet noble Klingon commander from “Day of the Dove,” actor Michael Ansara helped redefine one of Star Trek’s most popular alien species. The powerfully built, 6-foot-3 Ansara was a towering physical presence. More important to his role, however, was the actor’s almost regal demeanor, which he developed playing Indian chiefs and Arabian princes. His Kang is a cunning warrior, but also a man of honor—in short, the type of sympathetic Klingon that would be depicted in later Star Trek series, beginning with The Next Generation. Kang served as the model for future Klingons, who were intimidating but respectable, adhering to a stringent ethical code. The character was so popular that Ansara was asked to reappear as Kang in the Deep Space Nine episode “Blood Oath” in 1994 and in the Voyager installment “Flashback” in 1996. He also played Jeyal, the husband of Lwaxana Troi (Majel Barrett-Roddenberry) in the Deep Space Nine adventure “The Muse” (1996).
Born in Syria in 1922, Ansara emigrated to the U.S. at age two and moved to Los Angeles ten years later. His screen career began in the late 1940s. For years, he moved between small, often uncredited, roles in major motion pictures—including director Joseph Mankiewicz’s Julius Caesar (1953) and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956)—and meatier roles on television. Due to his exotic features, Ansara played a wide variety of ethnic “types,” but was most frequently cast as an American Indian. He starred as Chief Cochise on the ABC Western series Broken Arrow from 1956 through 1959. Coincidentally, Leonard Nimoy guest starred on Broken Arrow in 1957. In other pre-Trek roles, Ansara worked with William Shatner, James Doohan, and George Takei. Ansara’s other science fiction credits include Irwin Allen’s movie Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961) and episodes of The Outer Limits, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Time Tunnel, and Babylon 5. He had a recurring role as the villainous Killer Kane on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979–81). Late in his career, he became an in-demand voice actor, and played Mr. Freeze on Batman: The Animated Series and related projects. From 1958 to 1974, Ansara was married to actress Barbara Eden, star of the sitcom I Dream of Jeannie. (The couple met on a date arranged by the 20th Century-Fox publicity department). He is now married to actress Beverly Kushida and is semiretired.
William Campbell
Although fame, fortune, and critical acclaim eluded him, actor William Campbell made a living in film and television for more than four decades, from 1950 to 1996, before retiring and taking over as administrator of the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, California, a retirement community for Screen Actors Guild members. During his lengthy career, the New Jersey–born Campbell appeared in more than eighty films (almost all B-movies) and television shows. He sang with Elvis Presley in Love Me Tender (1956) and starred in a short-lived syndicated TV series, Cannonball (1958–59), about cross-country truck drivers. In 1963, he starred in director Francis Ford Coppola’s debut film, the low-budget chiller Dementia 13, and in Roger Corman’s exploitation classic The Young Racers. But Campbell is remembered today primarily for two remarkable appearances on Star Trek.
During the show’s first season he guest starred as the impish, apparently omnipotent Trelaine, the title character in “The Squire of Gothos.” As Trelaine, Campbell delivered a delightfully swishy performance modeled, in part, after the mannerisms of pianist Liberace (whom Campbell resembled). The Trelaine character would serve as a forerunner of the Q species featured in later Star Trek series The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. During the making of “The Squire of Gothos,” Campbell struck up a long-lasting friendship with James Doohan. Campbell returned to Star Trek a season later to appear as the Klingon Captain Koloth in “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Although the actor wasn’t available to provide the voice of Koloth for the animated sequel “More Tribbles, More Troubles” (instead, Doohan imitated his friend’s voice), Campbell reprised the character for the Deep Space Nine episode “Blood Oath” in 1994. He also provided the voice of Trelaine for a Star Trek video game in 1993. Campbell also appeared in Gene Roddenberry’s only theatrical feature, Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), and was a popular guest at Star Trek conventions in the 1980s and ’90s. He passed away in 2011.
Roger C. Carmel
Roger C. Carmel’s Harry Mudd episodes were so popular that they were sold as a special two-tape set during the VHS era.
During his twenty-nine-year screen career, Brooklyn native Roger C. Carmel appeared in seventy-four movies and television series, playing a wide variety of character parts. But he will be forever remembered as Harcourt Fenton Mudd, the interstellar con man who befuddled Captain Kirk and company in two Star Trek episodes (“Mudd’s Women” and “I, Mudd”), as well as an installment of the animated series (“Mudd’s Passion”). Mudd was the only recurring character outside the Enterprise crew featured during Star Trek’s original three seasons. Thanks in large part to Carmel’s devilishly good comedic timing, Mudd became a great favorite of fans. The character was frequently revived by the writers of Star Trek novels and comic books. Although Harry Mudd was a constant source of irritation for the crew of the Enterprise, Carmel was well liked by the cast of Star Trek and became, like Campbell, a frequent guest at fan conventions in the 1980s. Nichelle Nichols writes warmly about Carmel in her autobiography, Beyond Uhura.
Carmel’s screen career began with an uncredited bit as a stagehand in director Sidney Lumet’s 1958 feature Stage Struck. Carmel worked primarily on television, winning guest roles on shows including The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Munsters, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Batman in the 1960s prior to Star Trek. He continued to work steadily throughout the 1970s and ’80s, but obesity and poor health limited him to voice work for cartoon shows like The Transformers and The Adventures of the Gummi Bears late in his life. Had the actor been in better physical condition, Harry Mudd would have made a comeback on Star Trek: The Next Generation. A story was developed that would have awakened Mudd from cryogenic sleep so that he could flummox Captain Jean-Luc Picard as he once had Captain Kirk. Unfortunately, in 1986, before the plan came to fruition, Carmel died of congestive heart failure. He was fifty-four years old.
Joan Collins
TV Guide’s Close-Up on “The City on the Edge of Forever,” previewing the episode prior to its original broadcast, highlighted Joan Collins’s guest appearance.
The rest of the world may know Joan Collins as Alexis Carrington from the nighttime soap opera Dynasty, which ranked among TV’s most-watched programs from 1981 to ’87. But Star Trek fans remember Collins as Edith Keeler, Captain Kirk’s doomed love interest in the classic episode “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Her Star Trek role was a departure for the actress, who was typically cast as a sex kitten. Keeler wins Kirk’s heart not with her beauty, or at least not merely with her beauty, but with her compassion and her soaring vision of a future when war and poverty will be eradicated. It’s a touching, heartfelt performance that allows Collins more range and depth in a single episode than Dynasty provided in six seasons. Screenwriter Harlan Ellison based Keeler on Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, the Pentecostal missionary who became a media sensation after founding the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel in Los Angeles in 1923.
Born in London in 1933, Collins was the daughter of talent agent Joe Collins, whose clients included actors Peter Sellers and Roger Moore and singers Shirley Bassey and Tom Jones. (Collins’s sister, Jackie, is a novelist known for her racy romances, often set in Hollywood.) Joan trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, began her screen career in the early 1950s, and had tallied more than thirty film and television credits prior to Star Trek. In 1954, 20th Century-Fox signed Collins because executives believed she could compete with MGM’s Elizabeth Taylor. The next year, Collins appeared opposite Bette Davis in The Virgin Queen and starred in Howard Hawks’s big-budget flop Land of the Pharaohs. After Fox released Collins in the early 1960s, she drifted into television, including Batman, where she guest starred as a villainess named the Siren. More TV and B-movie work followed her appearance on Star Trek. In the film Tales from the Crypt (1971), she was menaced by a homicidal maniac in a Santa Claus suit. And she costarred with Robert Lansing (Star Trek’s Gary Seven) in director Bert I. Gordon’s 1977 schlock-fest Empire of the Ants. Collins joined the cast of Dynasty at the beginning of the show’s second season, when the flamboyant, back-stabbing Alexis was introduced as a rival to Krystle Carrington (Linda Evans). The show’s ratings soared.
Kathryn Hays
Without saying a word, Kathryn Hays delivered one of Star Trek’s most memorable guest performances in the title role of “The Empath.” Playing a mute alien who learns compassion by using her empathic powers to heal first Captain Kirk and later a dying Dr. McCoy, Hays performed with otherworldly delicacy and almost balletic grace. She plays this fragile, frightened woman—who McCoy nicknames “Gem”—like a porcelain doll come to life, afraid she might be shattered at any moment. Hays’s work is all the more remarkable since it’s delivered entirely through pantomime. Along with a handful of other one-shot Trek characters, “Gem” gained an ardent cult following; she and her species have been the subject of much fan-written fiction. DeForest Kelley named “The Empath” his personal favorite Star Trek episode.
Born Kay Piper in Princeton, Illinois, in 1933, Hays’s screen career began in 1962 and remains active. She has worked almost exclusively in television, including guest roles on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and The Man from U.N.C.L.E. prior to her appearance on Star Trek. One of her earliest assignments was an episode of Naked City (“The Rydecker Case”) written by Gene Roddenberry. She also appeared on Roddenberry’s short-lived military drama The Lieutenant in 1963. After Trek, Hays costarred with Leonard Nimoy in a 1972 episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. In the 1970s, the actress found steady work on daytime soaps, appearing on Guiding Light in 1971 before beginning a long association with As the World Turns. Sporting her trademark “pixie cut” hairdo, she played the frequently married (sometimes divorced, sometimes widowed) Kim Hughes on As the World Turns from 1972 to 2010. Hays herself has been married three times. When “The Empath” was filmed, her husband was actor Glenn Ford, but the couple divorced in 1969.
Mark Lenard
Of all the Star Trek guest stars, Mark Lenard may have been the most popular, both with fans and with producers. He made two landmark appearances—first as a nameless Romulan commander in “The Balance of Terror” and then as Spock’s father, Sarek, in “Journey to Babel.” Lenard was also invited back for a third appearance and considered for an even larger role.
Born Leonard Rosenson in Chicago, Illinois, in 1924, Lenard was the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants and served as a paratrooper in World War II. After the war he studied theater arts at the New School in New York and at the University of Michigan, and appeared in a handful of Broadway plays in the late 1950s. His screen career began in 1960 and included sporadic work, mostly in television, over the next thirty-three years. He continued to work regularly on the stage. Lenard brought impressive gravitas and nuance to his role as the nameless Romulan commander who engages in a cat-and-mouse battle with Captain Kirk in “Balance of Terror.” His fine work won the admiration of creator-producer Gene Roddenberry and casting director Joe D’Agosta. They were so impressed, in fact, that when Leonard Nimoy and Roddenberry became embroiled in a salary dispute in the interim between Seasons One and Two, Lenard was considered as a replacement for Nimoy. After Nimoy finally came to terms, Lenard was invited back to appear as Spock’s father in “Journey to Babel.” His vivid, subtle performance illuminated one of the series’ most complex characters. One testament to the actor’s excellence is that audiences never questioned him as Spock’s father, even though Lenard was only six years older than Nimoy. Roddenberry and D’Agosta asked Leonard to play Abraham Lincoln in the Season Three episode “The Savage Curtain,” but the actor was unavailable.
After Star Trek, Lenard worked with Nimoy again in a 1970 episode of Mission: Impossible. He landed featured roles on the ABC series Here Come the Brides (1968–70), inspired by Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and on CBS’s short-lived Planet of the Apes TV series (1974), in which he played the brutal gorilla General Urko. Having portrayed a Romulan, a Vulcan, and a talking gorilla, Lenard signed on to appear as the unnamed Klingon captain featured in the opening scenes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979). But the actor remained best known as Sarek, a role he reprised on several occasions—for the animated series episode “Yesteryear”; in the third, fourth, and sixth Star Trek feature films (The Search for Spock, 1984; The Voyage Home, 1986; and The Undiscovered Country, 1991); and in two episodes of The Next Generation (“Sarek” and “Unification”). In his later years, Lenard also taught acting and provided voice-over narration for commercials and documentaries. But he was unable to work during the final two years of his life as he battled bone cancer. The disease took Lenard’s life in 1996 at age seventy-two.
Celia Lovsky
Screen veteran Celia Lovsky had fewer than fifteen minutes of screen time on Star Trek but made every second count in her pivotal role as the legendary Vulcan leader T’Pau, who oversees Spock’s ill-fated marriage in “Amok Time,” one of the foundational episodes of the entire Trek franchise. Lovsky enriches her small role with subtle gestures and expressions that make T’Pau a fully realized character, even though her purpose is purely expository: She proudly explains her culture’s ancient, Byzantine mating rituals for Captain Kirk and Dr. McCoy. The actress’s thick accent and dignified bearing bring touches of the exotic and regal to T’Pau. And while Lovsky remains appropriately (for a Vulcan) aloof, she allows flickers of emotion to seep through the character’s icy veneer, displaying hints of annoyance with Spock’s faithless fiancée, T’Pring (Arlene Martel), and of grief when Spock appears to kill Kirk in ceremonial combat. Her superb work helps ground the episode, which was the first to explore the Vulcan culture in depth.
Lovsky, born in Austria in 1897, studied at the Austrian Royal Academy of Arts and Music before moving to Berlin to pursue film and theater roles in the 1920s. There she met and eventually married actor Peter Lorre, whom she introduced to director Fritz Lang. In 1935, following’s Lorre’s breakout success in Lang’s M, Lorre and Lovsky immigrated to Hollywood. Although the couple divorced in 1945, she remained devoted to Lorre, working as his publicist and financial manager until the actor’s death in 1964. As she aged, Lovsky specialized in exotic character parts in movies and television. Prior to Star Trek, she appeared on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1959) and The Twilight Zone (1964), and played Lon Chaney’s mother in the biopic Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), directed by Joseph Pevney. Pevney later directed fourteen episodes of Star Trek, including “Amok Time,” and was instrumental in casting Lovsky as T’Pau. Lovsky’s final film role was in the dystopian Soylent Green (1971). In all, she made more than 120 film and television appearances before her death in 1979 at age eighty-two.
Ricardo Montalban
Ricardo Montalban brought dignity and charisma to his role as the imperious, superhuman Khan, one of Star Trek’s greatest villains.
The distinguished Ricardo Montalban worked in film and television for nearly sixty years, piling up more than 160 screen roles, but he seldom found parts equal to his talent. Star Trek offered him a chance to shine as the imperious, superhuman Khan Noonien Singh, who menaced the Enterprise crew in the episode “Space Seed” and again on the big screen in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Following the shaky performance of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the blockbuster success of Wrath of Khan assured the future of the Trek franchise. In “Space Seed,” Montalban radiates authority and charisma as Khan seduces a female historian and out-thinks, out-fights, and out-machos Captain Kirk for most of the episode. In the end he is not so much defeated as forced to compromise. Montalban’s dynamic screen presence was a source of irritation for William Shatner, who hated being upstaged. According to James Doohan, Nichelle Nichols, and Walter Koenig, Shatner held Montalban in disdain throughout the production of both “Space Seed” and Wrath of Khan, even though the actor was well liked by the rest of the cast and crew.
Ricardo Gonzalo Pedro Montalban y Merino was born in Mexico City in 1920 and, after appearing in a half-dozen films in his native country, moved to Hollywood in 1947. He was immediately typecast as the exotic Latin lover and romanced various starlets on the big screen for the next four years. His heartthrob status waned after 1951 when he fell off a horse while filming Across the Wide Missouri and suffered a grievous spinal injury that left him with a permanent limp. Throughout the 1950s, Montalban appeared in Broadway productions and supplemented his income through television guest appearances, including episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1960) and Gene Roddenberry’s The Lieutenant (1964).
The once and future Khan played the kindly circus owner Armando in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), and earned an Emmy for his work in the miniseries How the West Was Won (1978). He won the leading role of Mr. Roarke on Aaron Spelling’s hit Fantasy Island (1977–84) and later starred as the villainous Zach Powers on the Dynasty spin-off The Colbys (1985–87). He remains familiar to many viewers as the pitchman who rhapsodized about the Chrysler Cordoba and its “Corinthian leather” seats during a series of commercials made during this period. In 1993, he earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Screen Actors Guild. In his acceptance speech, Montalban offered the following as the five stages of an actor’s career:
1. Who is Ricardo Montalban?
2. Get me Ricardo Montalban.
3. Get me a Ricardo Montalban type.
4. Get me a young Ricardo Montalban.
5. Who is Ricardo Montalban?
That same year, complications from his old spinal injury left Montalban paraplegic. But the actor continued to perform voice work and occasional on-camera parts that hid his condition. He died of congestive heart failure at age eighty-eight in 2009. Montalban was a cofounder of the Nosotros Foundation, which supports Latino filmmakers. Hollywood’s Ricardo Montalban Theatre is named for him.
Robert Walker Jr.
As the endearing yet terrifying Charlie Evans, a lovesick teenage misfit with fearsome telekinetic abilities, Robert Walker Jr. delivered Star Trek’s earliest great guest performance. The youthful-looking Walker was twenty-six when he starred as the seventeen-year-old Charlie Evans in “Charlie X,” the seventh episode produced and second one broadcast. Charlie, marooned on a remote planet as a child and raised by aliens, develops an unrequited crush on Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) and lashes out in superpowered rage when frustrated or embarrassed. In his tender scenes with Whitney, Walker seems to be nearly bursting with pent-up yearnings—physical and emotional. Charlie’s frustration evidences itself in petulant, reflexive acts of violence (causing a spaceship to blow apart, “thinking” a crewman out of existence) when Charlie feels threatened or ridiculed. Walker is terrifying in these sequences, yet recaptures our sympathy in the episode’s unforgettable conclusion. Charlie pleads to remain with the humans rather than return to his forlorn existence with the aliens; Walker’s delivery is wrenching.
The son of two A-list Hollywood stars (Robert Walker and Jennifer Jones) and later the stepson of legendary producer David O. Selznick, Walker appeared in a few television roles as a teenager before enrolling at the Actors Studio in New York in the early 1960s. In 1963, he earned a Golden Globe as “Promising Newcomer” for his performance in actor-director Laurence Harvey’s The Ceremony. A year later, he earned a Theatre World Award for his work in the off-Broadway productions I Knock at the Door and Pictures in the Hallway. For the rest of his career, however, his screen credits consisted primarily of low-budget films such as Son of Blob (1972) and TV guest appearances on shows including The Invaders, Time Tunnel, and The Six Million Dollar Man. He and his first wife, actress Ellie Wood, played minor roles in the landmark Easy Rider (1969). Walker is now married to actress Dawn Walker, his third wife, with whom he has a daughter and a son. Producer Ira Steven Behr offered Walker a role on Deep Space Nine in 1997, but the actor declined.
William Windom
In a career that stretched from 1949 to 2006, William Windom piled up an astounding 247 screen credits, along with countless theatrical roles. But Star Trek aficionados remember him for his spellbinding performance as the revenge-obsessed, guilt-stricken Commodore Matt Decker in “The Doomsday Machine.” Windom’s edgy, pathos-laden portrayal of the haggard, half-crazed Decker, bent on destroying the giant, planet-eating superweapon that claimed the lives of his entire crew, ranks among the richest in the Trek canon. He made a fine Ahab for screenwriter Norman Spinrad’s tale, which was modeled after Moby Dick.
Windom was born in New York City in 1923 and, like Mark Lenard, served as a paratrooper in World War II. After the war, he studied at the American Repertory Theatre in New York and performed Shakespeare, Ibsen, and other classical plays in various off-Broadway venues in the late 1950s and early ’60s. He made his feature film debut as the prosecutor in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). Windom worked with Shatner again in 1969 for a CBS Playhouse production, “Shadow Game,” and reunited with Nimoy for the 1971 telefilm Assault on the Wayne. Windom’s other sci-fi credits include two forays into The Twilight Zone (in 1961 and ’63) and appearances on The Bionic Woman (1976) and The Incredible Hulk (1981). Windom won an Emmy Award for his portrayal of garrulous cartoonist John Monroe on the short-lived sitcom My World and Welcome to It (1969–70), based on the work of acclaimed humorist James Thurber. Windom also had a recurring role on the long-running mystery series Murder, She Wrote. The actor reprised the Matt Decker character in 2004 for an episode of the fan-created Internet series Star Trek: The New Voyages (“In Harm’s Way”). He retired in 2006.
Jane Wyatt
Mark Lenard and Jane Wyatt convincingly portrayed Spock’s parents, Sarek and Amanda, in the episode “Journey to Babel.” In actuality, Lenard was fourteen years younger than Wyatt, and just six years older than his “son,” Leonard Nimoy.
Jane Wyatt became a household name playing über-mom Margaret Anderson on the long-running Robert Young sitcom Father Knows Best (1954–60). The role earned her three consecutive Emmy Awards from 1958 through 1960. But Star Trek fans remember the actress as Amanda Grayson, mother of Spock and wife of Sarek in the classic episode “Journey to Babel.” Her heartfelt performance in her understated romantic scenes with Sarek (Mark Lenard) and especially in her fiery exchange with Spock (who refuses to surrender temporary command of the Enterprise, even to save his father’s life) supplies much of the episode’s gripping emotional power. Wyatt later reappeared as Amanda Grayson for a cameo in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986).
Born in New Jersey in 1910, Wyatt was the daughter of a Wall Street investment banker and a female drama critic. She began acting shortly after college, won her first Broadway role in the early 1930s, and was signed to a studio contract by Universal. In 1937, she costarred with Ronald Colman in director Frank Capra’s classic romantic fantasy Lost Horizon, which earned seven Academy Award nominations. She later appeared in the Oscar-winning Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and other prestigious vehicles until she was blacklisted for her vocal opposition to congressional probes into Communism among Hollywood writers, directors, and actors in the 1950s. She returned to Broadway and eventually became a TV star, but her feature film career never fully recovered. Father Knows Best, based on a popular radio show, remains her most celebrated work. In real life, Wyatt was the wife of investment broker Edgar Bethune Ward, whom she married in 1935 and remained devoted to until his death sixty-five years later. Wyatt passed away of natural causes in 2006.