Barbara Myers

Barbara Ellen Myers is an American former child model and stage and television actress, born in 1946 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in the Bensonhurst neighborhood. The daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ned Myers, she later attended Hunter College. Her Broadway career spanned from 1956 to 1965, encompassing both dramatic and musical productions.

Myers entered the public eye at a young age as a Conover model. A December 1950 item in the Brooklyn Eagle noted that the four-year-old was already a familiar presence in front of the camera and was appearing on the covers of several national magazines at that time. By the summer of 1952, she was featured on the back cover of Ladies' Home Journal and in various other publications as part of the national advertising campaign for Lady Wildroot shampoo.

Her television work began in earnest in the fall of 1953, when she appeared in three episodes of the religious program Lamp Unto My Feet and then stepped into the role of Angela, the youngest daughter, in the final episodes of the short-lived NBC sitcom Bonino, replacing Lucille Graygor in the part. In January 1954, she appeared alongside Gage Clark and Lois Bolton in the Mama episode "T.R. and the Buttercups." Around the same period, she joined the cast of the daytime soap opera Woman with a Past, playing Diane Sherwood, the daughter of the show's central character, Lyn Sherwood, portrayed by Constance Ford. That role would become one of her most recognized credits. Also in 1954, she appeared in two episodes of Kraft Television Theatre: as Pearl, the illegitimate daughter of Hester Prynne, in an adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, and as Debbie in Aurand Harris's "A Party for Jonathan." In March of that year, nationally syndicated columnist Earl Wilson described her as one of the cutest stage and television actresses he had encountered.

Myers's Broadway work brought her two featured roles in 1957. In Arthur Laurents's A Clearing in the Woods, she played the youngest of three onstage alter egos of the play's protagonist, portrayed by Kim Stanley. That same year, she appeared in Morton Wishengrad's drama The Rope Dancers as the character Clementine, performing alongside Siobhan McKenna, Art Carney, Beverly Lunsford, and Joan Blondell, who played Clementine's mother, Mrs. Farrow. Her Broadway credits also include the musical The Most Happy Fella and the play The Playroom.

In 1959, Myers played Patsy Gallagher in a CBS television remake of the 1945 box office hit, appearing in a supporting cast that included Glenda Farrell, Charlie Ruggles, and Marc Connelly, with Robert Preston and Claudette Colbert in the leading roles. Daily News critic Kay Gardella, reviewing the production, singled out Ruggles and Myers among its redeeming qualities. In October 1965, Myers portrayed Abishag in the Directions '66 episode "David and Nathan," which costarred Biff McGuire as King David and Lawrence Keith as Nathan the Prophet. Her final screen credit came on May 28, 1967, in "New Life to Live," the second installment of a series of Pentecost-themed episodes of the religious program Look Up and Live.

In 1966, the New York Times published an announcement from Mr. and Mrs. Myers of their daughter's engagement to Gerald Siegal, formerly of South Carolina, who worked as a New York-based talent agent and was later described by columnist Liz Smith as "the flack with a sense of humor." The couple had one child, a son born in 1981. As of June 2008, according to an obituary published in the Florence Morning News, Gerald and Barbara Siegal remained married and were still residing in New York.