Bethel Leslie

Bethel Leslie

An actress since her early teens, Bethel Leslie made her Broadway bow opposite Conrad Janis in 1944's Snafu. Leslie later appeared as Rachel in the original 1956 production of Inherit the Wind; she went on to gain near-legendary status among West Coast actors for her work in a 1959 staging of Career, aging 30 years in the third act simply by wearing a hat. Though she has been in films sporadically since 1958, she is most widely known for her television work. Her first series stint was as Cornelia Otis Skinner in The Girls (1950), a TV-sitcom adaptation of Ms. Skinner's autobiography Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. Together with Vera Miles and Beverly Garland, she was one of the busiest and most-in-demand TV guest actresses of the 1950s and 1960s; she played everything from kidnap victims to cold-blooded murderesses, and was seen as three different defendants on three different Perry Mason episodes. Her versatility really got a workout on The Richard Boone Show (1963), a weekly TV anthology wherein a repertory company of eleven actors played parts in all the plays. More recently, Bethel Leslie has evinced a preference for the stage; one of her most formidable assignments was the killer part of Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide