What do Father Knows Best, The Andy Griffith Show, The Odd Couple and the original Star Trek have in common? It’s not as odd a question as you might think. The commonality is actually actress Elinor Donahue, who became a part of classic TV history on Father Knows Best and, ever so briefly, The Andy Griffith Show, the latter for about a dozen episodes.
A few years after her stint in Mayberry, Elinor guest starred on the 1967 Trek episode “Metamorphosis,” which, while not usually on Top 10 lists, is an extremely powerful story exploring the nature of love. Several years later she joined Oscar Madison and Felix Unger on the TV version of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple, playing Felix’s girlfriend, Miriam Welby. All in all, Elinor Donahue has proven herself to be the face of classic TV.
Donahue was born on April 19, 1937 in Tacoma, Washington, and was a child actress who worked in vaudeville and had small parts in several movies. Her focus really shifted to dancing, until she was hired to play Betty Anderson — aka “Princess” — on Father Know Best, which ran from 1954 to 1960.
After which, beyond the shows noted above, she appeared in several films and TV movies, and made numerous guest appearances. She had starring or recurring roles in Many Happy Returns (1964 to 1965), The Flying Nun (1968 to 1970), Mulligan’s Stew (1977), The New Adventures of Beans Baxter (1987), Get a Life (1990 to 1992), Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993 to 1997), and her final role, as Judge Marie Anderson, in four episodes of The Young and the Restless (2010 to 2011).
Now 86 and retired, Elinor Donahue has been married four times and is the mother of four.
In this conversation, Elinor looks back at her days as a star of classic television.
ELINOR DONAHUE: It’s running here in California at least in our area in the morning and I didn’t realize it until a friend of mine, whose husband gets up very early to go to work and she stays in bed and turns on the TV, told me about it.
She’s younger by a good 20 years and the morning won’t go by without her watching Father Knows Best. I started checking it out and realized how much I didn’t know. I didn’t watch the show back then, because we all were busy working on it. By the time we’d get home at night and have our dinner, we’d be getting ready to learn our lines and go to sleep to get up and go do it again. I never saw the show. So I’m sort of catching up, and it’s quite fun, actually.
ELINOR DONAHUE: Great fondness. Fondness for the group of us. We were very, very close and really liked each other. It brings, generally speaking, happy memories. I was very critical of myself when I was young, which is probably another reason I didn’t watch the show. I made myself uncomfortable. I didn’t like looking at it. Now I can be a little bit more forgiving.
