Meg Wyllie

Margaret Gillespie Wyllie was born on February 15, 1917, in Honolulu, Territory of Hawaii, and died on January 1, 2002, in Glendale, California, from heart failure at the age of 84. An American actress whose career spanned stage and screen, she was survived by a cousin.

Wyllie spent her childhood in the Philippines, where her father worked as an engineer on sugar plantations on Negros Island near Bacolod. She received her grammar school and high school education at the Brent School in Baguio before relocating to New York City in the 1940s.

Her stage career included work at the Pasadena Playhouse, where she appeared in productions such as Dear Brutus, Morning Glory, Two on an Island (1940), and All the Comforts of Home (1941). She was also part of the original production of The Glass Menagerie. In 1958 she appeared in Visit to a Small Planet. On Broadway, Wyllie performed in The First Gentleman, Norman Ginsbury's historical play, in 1957.

Television became the primary arena of Wyllie's professional life. In 1960 alone she appeared in the Tightrope! episode "Bullets and Ballet," the Wagon Train episode "The Ricky & Laurie Bell Story" as Mrs. Blowers, the Twilight Zone episode "The Night of the Meek," and the CBS series Hennesey, in which she played Mrs. Shafer in the episode "The Captain's Dilemma." Between 1962 and 1966 she made four guest appearances on Perry Mason, including the role of Ninevah Stone in "The Case of the Nebulous Nephew" (1963) and Marguerite Keith in "The Case of the Ruinous Road" (1964).

During the 1963–1964 season, Wyllie held a recurring role as Mrs. Kissel in 18 episodes of the ABC family western series The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, which starred Kurt Russell in the title role. Mark Allen played her husband, Matt Kissel, in nineteen episodes. Four members of The Osmonds were cast in the same series as the singing sons of the Kissel family, with character names drawn from books of the Old Testament: Micah, Deuteronomy, Lamentations, and Leviticus.

In 1964, Wyllie portrayed the Talosian "Keeper" in "The Cage," the original pilot episode of Star Trek, making her character the first villain in the franchise's history. Because the pilot was not broadcast in its original form for many years, the footage was later incorporated into the two-part episode "The Menagerie" in 1966. She appeared in the 1965 Addams Family episode "Cousin Itt's Problem" as Mrs. Dragwater, and in 1967 she appeared alongside Tallulah Bankhead in the Batman episode "Black Widow Strikes Again."

Wyllie appeared on General Hospital in three separate roles across different decades: as Nurse Doris Roach in 1974, who revealed to Lesley Faulkner that her daughter Laura Vining was still alive; as antique shop proprietor Hester Frumpkin in 1982, who worked for Laura's kidnapper David Gray; and briefly as a replacement for Anna Lee in the role of Lila Quartermaine in 1994. She also portrayed multiple different characters on both The Golden Girls and Designing Women.