Elinor Donahue star of ‘Father Knows Best’ and her six-decade screen career
Wikipedia Commons / Elinor Donahue and Lawrence Pressman promoting the premiere of the NBC television series Mulligan’s Stew.
In all the 86-year-old screen legend has appeared in more than 70 TV shows as well as movies such as Winter Wonderland and Pretty Woman.
Elinor married her first husband when she was 19 years old and admitted that she hoped if she got married and had a baby she would become a grown up.
“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 decided the next person who asked she would agree to, this man turned out to be sound man on “Father Knows Best” Richard Smith.
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“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 Brian with him and the couple divorced six years later in 1961.
In 1962 she married prolific TV producer Harry Ackerman and had three sons with him. He was 20 years older than her and they remained happily married for almost 30 years until his death in 1991.
The following year she married her third and current husband contractor Lou Genevrino. She has been retired from our screens for the last decade.
For someone who never really thought about being on the screen she has had a prolific and very successful career.
