She spent her last years hosting a closed-circuit talk show for the people who cooked and cleaned at her retirement home, after seven decades of playing nurses, grandmothers and nuns on screen.
Betty McGuire, the actress who played Maggie Seaver’s mother on “Growing Pains,” died of natural causes on Oct. 8 at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif. She was 100. Keith Gerchak, an actor and close family friend who held McGuire’s power of attorney, confirmed the death. McGuire leaves no surviving family members.
McGuire had lived at the facility, a retirement home for entertainment industry veterans, since 2017.
Grandma Malone in 12 Episodes
Kate Malone — mother to Maggie Seaver, the character Joanna Kerns played, and grandmother to the Seaver children — was her role on the ABC sitcom. She appeared as Malone in 12 episodes between 1986 and 1991. Gordon Jump played her onscreen husband, Ed. McGuire turned up in all but one of the comedy’s seven seasons.
A Long Island family sat at the center of “Growing Pains,” which ran on ABC from 1985 to 1992 with Kerns, Alan Thicke and Kirk Cameron in the lead roles. Leonardo DiCaprio came aboard for the final season and turned up in more than 20 episodes.
Understudying Merman, Headlining as Mame
McGuire was born March 20, 1926, in Bridgeport, Conn., and made three Broadway appearances. The original productions of the musicals “Plain and Fancy” in 1955-56, “Happy Hunting” in 1956-57 and “Oh, Captain!” in 1958 put her onstage and in the understudy ranks beside Ethel Merman, Barbara Cook, Bea Arthur and Tony Randall.
She took the headline role as Mame at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and around the world. Her regional, national and Australian touring work included “Gypsy,” “Oliver!,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “The Ziegfeld Follies of 1956,” with stage co-stars including Tallulah Bankhead, Celeste Holm, Susan Hayward, Constance Bennett, Jane Russell and Ron Moody.
A Nun, a Nurse, Same Year
Two 1978 films put her in front of very different audiences. She played Sister Mary Quacker in Cheech & Chong’s “Up in Smoke” and a nurse in “Coma,” the Michael Crichton medical thriller starring Geneviève Bujold. She also appeared in “The Incredible Shrinking Woman” in 1981 and the 1997 horror picture “Wishmaster,” starring Robert Englund.
Episodic television kept McGuire busy across a 70-year career, with credits on “The Doris Day Show,” “Cannon,” “Columbo,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Baretta,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Lou Grant,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Moonlighting,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Falcon Crest,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “Murphy Brown,” “ER” and “7th Heaven.” She also made appearances on “MacGyver” and “CSI: Miami.”
“GabFest” on Channel 22
McGuire appeared in a 2019 “NBC Nightly News” piece profiling her retirement home, where she hosted and produced her own talk show, “GabFest,” on Channel 22, the closed-circuit station on the campus. The show focused on the dreams and life stories of the staffers rather than the famous residents around her.
“I’m a happy camper,” she said in the segment. “To have the chance to do new things and different things at 92, can you think of anything better? I can’t.”
Away from the screen and stage, the Coalition for Economic Survival drew years of volunteer work from McGuire, who served as a receptionist and advocate there. The legal clinic supports low-income tenants fighting eviction.
