Betty Lou Holland

Betty Lou Holland (December 26, 1925 – January 10, 2021), also known as Betty Lou Cordier, was an American actress born in New York City who worked across stage, television, and film from the 1940s through the early 1960s. She was particularly recognized for her Broadway career and for her leading role in a 1960 NBC television adaptation of The Devil and Daniel Webster.

Holland began her stage career in the 1940s and made her Broadway debut during that decade. Her Broadway credits included Call Me Mister, Annie Get Your Gun, Goodbye, My Fancy, The Member of the Wedding, Six Characters in Search of an Author, and The Devil's Disciple, the latter a play by George Bernard Shaw. Her Broadway appearances spanned from 1946 to 1955. In The Member of the Wedding, Holland was in her twenties at the time she portrayed a twelve-year-old character.

Her television work in the 1950s included a 1955 appearance in a CBS Danger episode adapting Daphne du Maurier's The Birds, which aired on May 31 of that year. In 1958 she appeared in the television special Johnny Belinda and portrayed a secretary recovering from mental illness in the drama series Decoy. Holland went on to play one of the principal roles in the NBC television adaptation of The Devil and Daniel Webster in 1960.

Holland appeared in two motion pictures. In The Goddess (1958) she played Mrs. Faulkner, the mother of Kim Stanley's character, and she later recalled that a lengthy religious conversion scene in the film drew applause from the Hollywood crew not for the quality of the acting but because all performers had successfully retained their lines. Her second film role was Roz Moreland in The Man in the Net (1959).

In January 1962 Holland married Robert Cordier, a Belgian-Franco-American director and poet, in New York City. The couple had two children, Cecilia Cordier and Horace Cordier. Robert Cordier died in Paris in April 2020 from complications of COVID-19. Holland herself survived a COVID-19 infection but died several months later in New York City on January 10, 2021, at the age of 95.