Harriet MacGibbon

Harriet Elizabeth MacGibbon (October 5, 1905 – February 8, 1987) was an American actress who worked across stage, film, and television over the course of a career spanning several decades. Born in Chicago, Illinois, she is perhaps best remembered for playing Mrs. Margaret Drysdale, a snobbish, blue-blooded Bostonian, in the television sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies, a role she held from 1962 to 1969.

MacGibbon began her professional stage work in stock, joining Edward Clarke Lilley's company in Akron, Ohio, before moving to San Francisco, where she took on leading roles for producer Henry Duffy. In Louisville, Kentucky, she performed alongside actors including Wilton Lackaye, Edmund Breese, William Faversham, Tom Wise, and Nance O'Neil. Her regional credits during this period included Ned McCobb's Daughter and The Front Page. She also starred opposite former world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey in a transcontinental tour of Max Marcin's The Big Fight, a production that originated in Boston, passed through New Haven and Hartford, Connecticut, and concluded at Caine's storehouse in Los Angeles.

Her Broadway career began in 1925, when she appeared in Beggar on Horseback at the Shubert Theatre at the age of nineteen. She continued performing on Broadway through 1958, accumulating credits that included Ringside Seat, The Marriage-Not, Midnight, The Inside Story, and Two on an Island, among other productions. In the late 1930s, MacGibbon appeared in You Can't Take It With You, the Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy, at the Biltmore Theatre in Los Angeles.

From 1934 to 1937, MacGibbon portrayed Lucy Kent on the NBC radio soap opera Home Sweet Home. Her screen debut came in 1930 with a non-speaking role in W.C. Fields' The Golf Specialist, filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in which she appeared as a snooty woman walking a dog across a golf course. She went on to appear in five theatrical films, among them Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1962), directed by Vincente Minnelli and featuring Glenn Ford, Ingrid Thulin, Charles Boyer, and Lee J. Cobb.

Television work became a significant part of MacGibbon's later career, beginning with guest appearances in 1950. She appeared in series including Bewitched, Ray Milland's Meet Mr. McNutley, and My Three Sons, in which she played Margaret Cunningham in the 1961 episode "Bub Goes to School." She held recurring roles on Golden Windows (1954) as Mrs. Brandon, on Hazel (1961) as Mother Baxter, and on The Smothers Brothers Show (1965) as Mrs. Costello. Her television film credits included Dragnet 1967, Wacky Zoo of Morgan City (1970), The Judge and Jake Wyler (1972), and The Best Place to Be (1979).

In her personal life, MacGibbon married producer William Reno Kane of Philadelphia in September 1930. The couple divorced in April 1942, at which point she married writer Charles Corwin White. White died on Christmas Day, 1967. MacGibbon had one son from her first marriage, William MacGibbon Kane, born in 1933, who predeceased her in 1977. MacGibbon died on February 8, 1987, at the age of 81. Her ashes were interred in niche 61046 in the Columbarium of Remembrance at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in the Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, California.