June Lockhart

She is in the 1938 A Christmas Carol as a Cratchit child, uncredited, and she was still taking voice roles in 2019. Between those two dates sits one of the longest working careers the American screen has produced, spent for the most part being other people's mothers.

The film half came first. Sergeant York in 1941, Meet Me in St. Louis in 1944 as Lucille Ballard, The Yearling in 1946, a lead in the horror picture She-Wolf of London the same year, and Mary Genaro in the 1947 noir T-Men. She was a two-time Emmy nominee and a Tony winner, and none of that is what the public kept.

Television is what the public kept. She played Ruth Martin on Lassie, Dr. Maureen Robinson on Lost in Space, and Dr. Janet Craig on Petticoat Junction from 1968 to 1970. Two of those characters carry a doctorate in the credit and a family in the script, and Lockhart played them with a briskness that kept the mother roles from turning saccharine; the warmth is there, but it never arrives on its own.

The last stretch was affectionate and often knowing. She did the horror-movie matriarch in Troll and Strange Invaders, turned up in C.H.U.D. II, voiced herself on The Critic, played a school principal in the 1998 Lost in Space film and a Secretary of State in Deterrence. She died in 2025, among the last people still working who had been on a Hollywood set in the 1930s.