Dallas's Miss Ellie is dead at 82

Barbara Bel Geddes, best known for her role as Dallas's Miss Ellie, has died at 82.

She had been battling lung cancer.

Although she played the matriarch of the Ewing clan in the TV series for more than ten years, she was also an accomplished movie and stage performer.

She was the first actress to play Maggie, the caustic, sexually starved wife in Tennessee Williams's 1955 Broadway play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

She was nominated for an Oscar for the 1948 movie I Remember Mama and played James Stewart's plucky girlfriend in Alfred Hitchcock's 1958 movie Vertigo. But it was as the homespun Miss Ellie in the American series Dallas that Miss Bel Geddes won the devotion of millions worldwide.

From 1978 to 1990, her wistful, enigmatic smiles and level-headed advice made her the Ewings' revered and ineffectual moral compass. She won an Emmy for the role in 1980.

In 1984, she needed time off from the series for heart surgery and was controversially replaced by Donna Reed.

But viewers never accepted the newcomer and Miss Bel Geddes returned to the series in 1985. Miss Reed, for her part, sued the producers and settled out of court.

Miss Bel Geddes was born into a theatrical family in 1922 in New York City.

Her father was the noted theatrical set designer and architect Norman Bel Geddes.

After a private education, she made her stage debut at 18 in a summer stock production of The School for Scandal.

A year later, she was on Broadway in Out of the Frying Pan.

She won the first Clarence Derwent Award - a prize for outstanding young performers - as well as a New York Drama Critics Award for Deep Are the Roots in 1945. She made her movie debut, opposite Henry Fonda and Vincent Price, in The Long Night in 1947.

Other film roles included the 1948 western Blood on the Moon, Caught in 1949 and Panic in the Streets in 1950.

Following her testimony before the Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, she had no work in Hollywood until Hitchcock cast her in Vertigo.