Today, June 25, marks the 99th birthday of actress June Lockhart. A look at the credits of her and her daughter Anne is a full nostalgia-rich ride through the history of the medium. Both actresses started off playing bright, approachably pretty young women before transitioning into maternal and older roles. Both found themselves perfectly suited to the small screen. And along the way, between starring roles and cameos, they cut a broad swath across series television.
June Lockhart, herself the daughter of a prolific film acting couple, had 14 movie credits between the ages of 13 and 22, including small roles in high-profile hits such as Sergeant York (1941) and Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and her first starring role in the pulp-horror flick She-Wolf of London (1946). But what would turn out to be her big career break started with a role in the 1945 sequel Son of Lassie, which later helped inspire a TV franchise. Between Broadway, marriage, and motherhood, she was seen little in movies or TV for a few years and had only one film role between 1947 and 1981. TV roles for dramatic actors in the early 1950s were heavy on one-episode stories on “theater” and variety shows named for their sponsor or their host. Between 1949 and 1959, Lockhart appeared (usually just once) on, among others, The Ford Theatre Hour, The Prudential Family Playhouse, Pulitzer Prize Playhouse, Betty Crocker Star Matinee, Hallmark Hall of Fame, Armstrong Circle Theatre, Kraft Theatre, Goodyear Playhouse, The Philco Television Playhouse, Science Fiction Theatre, The Alcoa Hour, Schlitz Playhouse, The Ford Television Theatre, The Joseph Cotten Show: On Trial, Robert Montgomery Presents, The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, Lux Video Theatre, Shirley Temple’s Storybook, Matinee Theatre, Zane Grey Theatre, The United States Steel Hour, and General Electric Theater, the last of these being the program hosted by Ronald Reagan for over 200 episodes between 1953 and 1962.
The age of those shows came and went (though not without a guest appearance for Lockhart on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1965). Then Lockhart (by now in her mid 30s) got the roles that made her a series TV fixture in the lives of the Baby Boom generation (and in reruns for later generations), playing the moms on Lassie from 1958 to 1964 and in Lost in Space from 1965 to 1968. She would later be a series regular on Petticoat Junction in 1968–70 and have a 14-episode arc on the soap opera General Hospital in the 1990s.
Lockhart got her daughter Anne — then six years old, now 70 — a handful of appearances on Lassie. My own generation got to know Anne Lockhart as Lieutenant Sheba, the female space-fighter pilot on the original Battlestar Galactica in 1978–79. But aside from voice work on a Spider-Man animated series in the early 1980s, a series regular role eluded her, and her film roles were either forgettable or in very small parts in big movies such as E.T., Risky Business, and City Slickers. Still, more than a few shows brought her back many times in uncredited or varying roles, most notably Dick Wolf’s Law & Order and Chicago franchises and other whodunits and police procedurals: 98 episodes of Chicago Fire, 18 episodes of Law & Order, 14 episodes of Diagnosis: Murder, ten episodes of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, eight episodes of The West Wing, five episodes of the early-2000s revival of Dragnet, four episodes of NCIS, three episodes of Simon & Simon, and two episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, etc.
It’s time as a series regular that imprints actors and actresses on our memories. But working television actors, especially those brought up in show-business families who know how the industry works, don’t just make their living off the fat years of being a series regular, however. It’s in the additional credits of an episode or two — month after month, year after year — where mother and daughter covered the waterfront of decades of television. Just look at some of the names on June Lockhart’s list, covering the eras of Westerns, nighttime soaps, and more: Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Wagon Train, Perry Mason, Bewitched, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Beverly Hillbillies, Marcus Welby, M.D., Vega$, Falcon Crest, Knots Landing, The Greatest American Hero, Quincy M.E., Hotel, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, Babylon 5, Roseanne, Step by Step, 7th Heaven, Beverly Hills, 90210, The Drew Carey Show, Grey’s Anatomy, and Cold Case, as well as a bunch of voice work (she was even in The Ren & Stimpy Show and Duckman, a long way from the world of her 1938 screen debut). Her last on-screen role in a small film came at age 91.
Anne Lockhart may not have had her mother’s recognition as a regular, but her own list of guest credits offers a similarly extensive tour of evening and sometimes daytime series TV, especially in the Seventies, Eighties, and early Nineties: Barnaby Jones, Emergency!, Police Story, CHiPs, B.J. and the Bear, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, The Incredible Hulk, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Voyagers!, The Paper Chase, Knight Rider, T.J. Hooker, Automan (a personal favorite among my memories of uber-cheesy early-’80s action shows), Airwolf, Doogie Howser, M.D., Quantum Leap, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, The Bold and the Beautiful, Walker, Texas Ranger, JAG, Law & Order: Trial by Jury, Psych, and It’s Complicated. Both mother and daughter appeared on Happy Days, Magnum, P.I., Murder: She Wrote (Anne, four times), and the late-’70s The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries (Anne, three times). June was on Love, American Style; Anne was on a rebooted version.
A happy birthday to June Lockhart, and to her and her daughter: Thanks for a lot of TV.