Lee Meriwether

A Miss America title is usually the end of a story rather than the start of one. Meriwether, born in Los Angeles in 1935, won the 1955 pageant and turned it into a working screen career that ran for six decades. The 1960s did most of the branding. She played Dr. Ann McGregor on The Time Tunnel, turned up on Mission: Impossible, and took over Catwoman from Julie Newmar for the theatrical Batman.

That Batman performance is better than its reputation. She plays the part twice over: Catwoman in the costume, and Kitka, the reporter alias used to get close to Bruce Wayne, and the joke of the film is that the same woman is running both operations while nobody in Gotham notices. It is a comic performance surrounded by comedians, and she is not the weakest of them.

The steady work came afterwards. As Betty Jones on Barnaby Jones she spent the 1970s as the title character's secretary and daughter-in-law, and the part brought two Golden Globe nominations and an Emmy nomination, which is a great deal of recognition for a role written as the lead's assistant. Later she played Lily Munster in a Munsters revival, held a long recurring part on the soap All My Children until it ended in 2011, and came back to the world that made her name by voicing a character in the animated Batman vs. Two-Face. The Ultimate films, starting with The Ultimate Gift, gave her Miss Hastings three separate times.