Anne Seymour

Anne Seymour, born Anne Seymour Eckert on September 11, 1909, in Manhattan, was an American stage, radio, film, and television character actress whose Broadway career spanned from 1930 to 1958. She died of heart failure in Los Angeles on December 8, 1988, at the age of 79, and is interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery.

Seymour came from a theatrical family with roots traceable to 18th-century Ireland, making her the seventh generation of performers in her lineage. Her mother, May Davenport Seymour, was an actress who later became curator of the Museum of the City of New York, and her father was William Stanley Eckert. Her great-uncle was character actor Harry Davenport, and her cousins included writer James Seymour and actor John Seymour. Her mother and her brother Bill Seymour were both active in radio at the same time she was. After completing her conventional education at St. Mary's, Seymour trained at the American Laboratory Theatre. Her first professional work came with the Jitney Players, where she earned fifteen dollars per week.

Her Broadway career encompassed four productions. In 1930 she appeared in both At the Bottom and Puppet Show, followed by The School for Scandal in 1931. Nearly three decades later, she returned to Broadway to portray Mrs. Sara Delano Roosevelt in the drama Sunrise at Campobello. Seymour also began her radio career early, debuting in Cincinnati in 1932. In the early 1940s she took on the leading female role of Prudence Dane in the NBC serial A Woman of America and starred as Mary Marlin in The Story of Mary Marlin, also on NBC. Her other radio credits included Joyce Jordan, Girl Interne; Tom Bradley; Against the Storm; and King Arthur, Junior.

On television, Seymour's first role was a three-month part in the NBC soap opera Follow Your Heart. She also held a recurring part on the CBS soap opera The First Hundred Years. In 1959 she played Dean Morse in the Peter Gunn episode "Terror on the Campus," and in 1960 she portrayed Amelia Tarbell in Pollyanna. She played Mrs. Barr in the fifteenth episode of the first season of My Three Sons in 1961, and that same year starred opposite Ed Wynn in the Rawhide episode "25 Santa Clauses." From 1962 to 1963 she starred in Empire, a series set in the modern American West. She appeared in two episodes of Perry Mason, playing Hettie Randall in "The Case of the Festive Felon" in 1963 and Bonnie Mae Wilmet in "The Case of the Bullied Bowler" in 1964. In 1965 she played Laura Kirkland in the Hazel episode "A 'Lot' to Remember," and in 1966 she guest-starred in the third season of Bewitched. Beginning in the spring of 1970, she was a regular cast member of The Tim Conway Show, playing airport and airline owner Mrs. K. J. Crawford across the show's twelve-episode run.

Seymour played three different characters across four episodes of Gunsmoke, appearing in "Snow Train Parts 1 & 2," "The Wake," and "Kitty's Injury." She portrayed Ms. Frost in the 1972 Bonanza episode "A Visit to Upright" and appeared in two episodes of Emergency!, playing retired head nurse Millie Eastman in "Foreign Trade," which aired November 16, 1974, and "Involvement," which aired January 24, 1976. She also played Miss Tilford in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and appeared as Esther in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "Final Escape" in 1985.

In film, Seymour appeared as Mrs. Lucy Stark in All the King's Men in 1949 and played Grandma Beebe in the 1961 children's film Misty, an adaptation of Marguerite Henry's Misty of Chincoteague. Her final screen performance was the role of Veda Ponikvar in Field of Dreams, released in 1989 after her death.