June Lockhart, the soft-spoken actress who exuded earnest maternal wisdom and wistful contentment in two very different mid-20th-century television roles, on the heartwarming children’s series “Lassie” and the futuristic “Lost in Space,” died on Thursday at her home in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 100.
Her death was announced by a spokesman, Harlan Boll.
Ms. Lockhart replaced Cloris Leachman in the role of Ruth Martin, a farm wife and the foster mother of Jon Provost’s character and his courageous collie, Lassie, in 1958, at the beginning of the show’s fifth season. After six years of dispensing homespun wisdom, Ms. Lockhart was herself replaced, along with her human co-stars, in favor of a forest-ranger character (Robert Bray) who would guide the show’s canine heroine through her further adventures.
In 1965, Ms. Lockhart returned to series television, playing a wife, mother and interplanetary explorer turned castaway on “Lost in Space.” Her television family included a robot who seemed to announce “Danger, Will Robinson,” alerting the show’s boy hero (Bill Mumy) to extraterrestrial menace, as often as Lassie’s sensitive ears and nose alerted her to earthly emergencies. The series, which combined an over-the-top villain (Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith) with low-budget production values, became something of a camp classic, acquiring a devoted following years after its original run.
Ms. Lockhart had known the luster of stardom much earlier in her career. When she was 22, she made her Broadway debut in “For Love or Money,” a middling comedy about an actor and a pretty vagrant, and won a Tony Award for best performance by a newcomer (a category that no longer exists).
Her performance, which also won the Theater World Award, prompted Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times’s lead theater critic, to describe her as “the only fresh idea in the evening” and to recommend that she “be kept under surveillance on Broadway to prevent her from returning to Hollywood” — where she had first worked almost a decade earlier.
She made her film debut at the age of 13, appearing uncredited in the 1938 version of “A Christmas Carol.” Her parents, the Canadian-born actor Gene Lockhart and the British-born actress Kathleen (Arthur) Lockhart, played the poor but happy Mr. and Mrs. Bob Cratchit; she played their daughter Belinda. She had first appeared onstage at 8 in a Metropolitan Opera production of “Peter Ibbetson.”
June Kathleen Lockhart was born on June 25, 1925, in Manhattan, an only child.
At first her parents chose her acting projects for her, reportedly allowing her to participate only in particularly prestigious films. They chose well, with young June taking supporting roles in “Sergeant York” (1941), with Gary Cooper; “All This, and Heaven Too” (1940), with Bette Davis; and “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1945), with Judy Garland. In a prescient bit of casting, she also appeared in “Son of Lassie” (1945), with Peter Lawford.
But she seemed to be making her own choices by 1946, when she starred in “She-Wolf of London,” a horror drama in which she and Don Porter were the biggest names. Her television career began in 1949, when she played Amy March in a “Ford Theater Hour” production of “Little Women.” During the 1950s she was seen on at least three dozen television series, including anthologies like “Studio One in Hollywood,” “The United States Steel Hour” and “Playhouse 90.”
After “Lost in Space” went off the air in 1968, Ms. Lockhart immediately signed on to join the cast of the rural sitcom “Petticoat Junction,” whose star, Bea Benaderet, had died. Playing a new doctor in town, she remained until the series ended its run two years later.
Beginning in 1984, she had a recurring role on the daytime soap opera “General Hospital.” She continued to make guest appearances on television series and was also occasionally seen in feature films, including “Strange Invaders” (1983), “The Big Picture” (1989) and “Sleep With Me” (1994).
Her last screen roles were in “Zombie Hamlet” (2012), in which she played a Southern matron who finances a strange film; “The Remake” (2018), a romantic comedy about actors; and the animated “Bongee Bear and the Kingdom of Rhythm” (2019), as the voice of Mindy the Owl. She also provided the voice of Alpha Control in the 2021 Netflix reboot of “Lost in Space.”
Ms. Lockhart married Dr. John F. Maloney, a former Navy physician, in 1951, and had two daughters with him. After their divorce in 1959, she was briefly married to John Lindsay, an architect. Her survivors include a daughter, June Elizabeth, and a granddaughter.
A political liberal, Ms. Lockhart had no illusions about the good old days. In a 2004 interview with The New York Times, she recalled a connection “Lassie” script writers had with McCarthy-era blacklisting.
“When people come up to me and say, ‘Well, sure wish we had wonderful American shows like that the way we used to in the ’50s,’ I say: ‘Let me tell you who wrote those scripts.’ Yes, they were good Americans, and they were in jail.”
In a lighter frame of mind, she told an NPR interviewer in 2004 that some astronauts had told her they were inspired to pursue their careers because of “Lost in Space.” In contrast, she said, “I did ‘Lassie’ for six years and I never had anybody come up to me and say, ‘It made me want to be a farmer.’”
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