Reta Shaw

Reta Shaw (September 13, 1912 – January 8, 1982) was an American character actress born in South Paris, Maine, to Howard Shaw, an orchestra leader. Her younger sister, Marguerite Shaw, also became an actress. Shaw was the daughter and granddaughter of women who practiced spiritualism, and she reportedly told a newspaper interviewer that she had been raised on a ouija board. She graduated from Paris High School in 1929, receiving the Alumni Prize and a varsity letter for managing the girls track team. During her youth she sang at the South Paris Congregational Church and took part in amateur theatricals before going on to study acting at the Leland Powers School of the Theater in Boston, Massachusetts.

Following her graduation from Leland Powers, Shaw worked in professional theater as a performer, accompanist, music director, and teacher. She served on the faculty of the Bishop Lee School in Boston and spent several seasons in summer stock in Malden Bridge, New York. Between 1936 and 1937, she worked as a vocal coach and acting teacher for children at the Studio Theater School in Buffalo, New York, where she also performed with the Studio Theater players in productions including Philip Barry's Spring Dance and directed Clare Kummer's one-act So's Your Old Antique for the Studio Theater Workshop. She additionally performed on local radio in Buffalo during that period. Shaw subsequently worked in nightclub comedy, and during World War II she joined the Red Cross Entertainment Unit, serving for three years largely overseas, including eighteen months in Iceland.

Shaw's Broadway career spanned from 1947 to 1954. Her first credited stage appearance in New York came in the 1947 production It Takes Two. She went on to appear in Virginia, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Picnic, before taking a comedic featured role as Mabel in the original 1954 Broadway production of The Pajama Game. She also toured with Mary Martin in Annie Get Your Gun.

Shaw translated several of her stage roles to film, appearing in the screen adaptations of both Picnic and The Pajama Game. She is perhaps most widely recognized for playing Mrs. Brill, the cook, in the 1964 Walt Disney film Mary Poppins, and for her co-starring role as housekeeper Martha Grant on the television series The Ghost & Mrs. Muir. Other film credits include Pollyanna, Bachelor in Paradise, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, and Escape to Witch Mountain, in which she played Mrs. Grindley, the owner of the orphanage where the film's central characters are placed after the death of their foster parents. That 1975 film marked her final screen performance.

Shaw's television work was extensive across the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. She appeared in the first season of The Ann Sothern Show as Flora Macauley, the overbearing wife of Jason Macauley, played by Ernest Truex. During the 1960–1961 season she played housekeeper Thelma on The Tab Hunter Show, and she portrayed housekeepers in both the 1961–1962 series Ichabod and Me and the 1962 series Oh! Those Bells, where she played the Wiere Brothers' landlady Mrs. Stansfield. On CBS's The Andy Griffith Show she appeared in two separate roles: escaped convict Big Maude Tyler in the episode "Convicts at Large" and voice teacher Eleanora Poultice in "The Song Festers." She played the recurring character Bertha/Hagatha, a matronly witch, on Bewitched, and appeared as Aunt Clara in a 1965 episode of Lost in Space. In 1967 she portrayed THRUSH agent Miss Witherspoon in an episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. A 1973 episode of The Odd Couple featured her as a nanny and former army colonel, and that same year she appeared in an episode of Emergency! as country nurse Ozella Peterson. In 1974 she played babysitter Mrs. McCarthy in an episode of Happy Days.

Shaw married and later divorced actor William Forester; together they had one daughter, Kathryn Anne Forester. Shaw died on January 8, 1982, in Encino, California, from emphysema, at the age of 69.