Veteran actress June Lockhart turns 100 this week, which frankly makes me feel kind of old myself.
Born June 25, 1925, she got an early start and eventually compiled a resume that encompassed stage, screen and television over the course of almost nine (nine!) decades. Her roles were diverse, but to many of us, she was one of TV’s most iconic moms.
I remember her best as Maureen Robinson, the matriarch of the ill-fated Robinson family in Lost in Space (1965-1968). The series was producer Irwin Allen’s futuristic riff on John David Wyss’s 1812 adventure novel, The Swiss Family Robinson. Every episode presented the Robinsons with some new intergalactic peril – and often some campy and absurd storylines – but the threats were never dire enough to stop Maureen from providing motherly advice to her three kids, softening her husband’s sometimes blustery edge, and getting the laundry done.
But Lost in Space was just a short slice of a much longer career. She made her stage debut at age eight (in an opera, no less), and appeared in subsequent Boadway productions throughout the 1940s. She landed her first film role (uncredited) at age 13, when she played Belinda Cratchit, one of Bob Cratchit’s daughters, in a 1938 MGM version of A Christmas Carol. (Fun fact: Bob Cratchit and his wife were played by June’s real-life parents, Gene and Kathleen Lockhart.)
She played mostly supporting roles in a string of movies through the 1940s, including Sergeant York (1941), Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and The White Cliffs of Dover (1944). She starred in the 1946 mystery/horror film, She-Wolf of London.
By the 1950s, her career had shifted away from the big screen and more toward the fledgling medium of television. Her first high-profile TV role was Ruth Martin – Timmy’s adoptive mom – in six seasons and 200 episodes (1958-1964) of the long-running Lassie series, followed immediately by the three years on Lost in Space. She also played a recurring role as Dr. Janet Craig in the last two seasons (1968-1970) of Petticoat Junction.
In addition to co-starring in these three popular TV franchises, she made scores of guest appearances in episodes of dramatic series, sitcoms and even soap operas spanning six decades. Most recently, at age 96, she was heard but not seen as the voice of a radio communications officer from Alpha Centauri in a third-season episode of Netflix’s reimagining of Lost in Space (2018-2021).
Bill Mumy, June’s Lost in Space co-star who played young Will Robinson in the original series, stayed in touch with his on-screen mom in the decades after the series went off the air. In a 2013 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, he described June’s off-screen persona as something a little more edgy than what a generation of TV audiences had come to know.
“June is such an interesting character,” said Mumy. “She is, without a doubt, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my entire life. She is truly a rock and roll goddess, I swear to God. She lives for rock and roll. In the eighties, she carried a picture of one person in her wallet, and it was David Bowie.”
Whatever her role, I always thought of June Lockhart as the pleasant lady next door or down the street – or on a planet several light years away – who was friendly to all the kids in the neighborhood and never hesitated to invite any or all of them to stay for lunch. She was from the same era and the same league that included actresses like Harriet Nelson, Barbara Billingsley, and a few others who collectively created a certain pop culture archetype that persists to this day. June just happened to do it in a metallic spacesuit for a few years.
As a kid who grew up in a golden age of network TV and syndicated reruns, I tip my space helmet to a century of June, an omnipresent figure in American television since American television began – and one of the nicest moms in this or any other galaxy.