“Father Knows Best” an American TV hit comic play made Elinor Donahue most renowned but this was not the end of her career when she did the show. She went on to gleam both on screen and off.
Elinor is now 86 and came on screen most recently having a guest role in the long-running soap opera “The Young and the Restless”.
Elinor was the main character of “Father Knows Best” as she played the role of elder daughter Betty ‘Princess’ Anderson. The show represents a middle-class family living an idealized all-American life in the Midwest.
The first show started on the radio in 1949 and aired every Thursday. In 1954 the show was uplifted by CBS for television keeping only actor Robert Young from the radio show who played dad Jim Anderson.
During her success with the most popular show, the show’s popularity was in the top ten most-watched American TV shows, Elinor also appeared in “Crossroads” and in the “George Burns and Gracie Allen Show.”
Her life became fast and furious and once she confessed that she didn’t have enough time to watch the show back.
“By the time we’d get home at night and have our dinner, we’d be getting ready to learn our lines, go to sleep to get up and do it again. So, I never saw the show,” she told Closer.
Elinor Donahue was born in 1937 in Tacoma, Washington. After some time she became the main job holder of the household when her career moved in her teenage years appearing in movies Love is Better than Ever, starring Elizabeth Taylor, and Girls Town.
Elinor was still a child and she was living in California, she had to keep an adult with her on set all the time. Her father was out of the picture and her mother worked full-time her mom Doris gave up her job.
After “Father Knows Best” ended Elinor performed in “The Andy Griffith Show”, “Dr Kildare”, “Star Trek” and “Mork & Mindy.”
In all the 86-year-old screen iconic actress has acted in more than 70 TV shows as well as movies such as Winter Wonderland and Pretty Woman.
When Elinor was just 19 years old she married her first husband. She disclosed that she hoped she would mature if she got married and had a baby.
“I had just turned 19 and I was like a 13-year-old 19,” she told Emmy TV Legends.
“I’d never had a chance to grow into a real person so I was not mature at all. I’d had no high school friends…I had this idea if I ran away and got married and had a baby I’d be a grown-up.”
So she first married the man who turned out to be the sound man on “Father Knows Best” Richard Smith.
“We had gone to see a movie and after he whispered in my ear ‘I love you and I’d like to marry you’ and I said ‘Okay,” she said laughing.
She had her first son Brain with him and six years later the couple divorced in 1961.
She married prolific TV producer Harry Ackerman in 1962 and had three sons with him. She was 20 years younger than him and they had been living a happy life for almost 30 years till his death in 1991.
In 2020, she married her third and current husband contractor Lou Genevrino. She retired from our screens in 1999.
Elinor had a very splendid acting career. She worked hard at an early age and this hard work took her to the height of success.