Switching gears from The Twilight Zone to The Addams Family – no, not that one; the one with Raul Julia and Christina Ricci – there’s Judith Malina as Granny long after her TV debut on The Goldbergs back in '54. (And, since she’s still up and around, I guess she could get work on the all-new all-different The Goldbergs.)
You maybe remember her as Aunt Dottie, on The Sopranos – or as Al Pacino’s mom, in Dog Day Afternoon – or from the Woody Allen picture she did back in the '80s, or from Queen of Sheba Meets Atom Man in the '60s – or from that TV movie she was in last year, on the heels of that romantic comedy she did with Kristen Bell?
She’s got a long and weird list of credits, is what I’m saying.
Wow! People have got to check out her IMDb page. Astonishing she has only 32 credits listed over such a long career. While she seems to have taken most the 70s and early 80s off, still you’d expect a much bigger list for someone who doesn’t seem to have had a problem finding work for over 60 years.
And she was married to the creepy guy in Poltergeist II.
Plus anyone who played a grandma in the 60s has to be dead by now, right?
Her fellow Goldbergs alum Viola Harris earned a more reasonable fifty IMDB credits: she spent the '50s getting work on M Squad and The Betty Hutton Show; the '60s on Gidget and Rawhide; the '70s, All In The Family and Ironside; and et cetera through LAW AND ORDER and LAW AND ORDER: SVU and right on up to (a) that Will Ferrell movie a few years back, and (b) a Heather Graham movie filming at present.
(And, man, The Secret Friend was just all kinds of award-bait back in 2010.)
There was an article last year about how Lita Milan – who did drama on Playhouse 90 and Public Defender, and comedy on The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show and The Bob Cummings Show, along with westerns like The Adventures of Jim Bowie and The Sheriff of Cochise, plus otherwise acting alongside everyone from Joseph Cotten to George Sanders on the small screen when she wasn’t up on the big screen with Buster Crabbe or Edward G. Robinson, all well before the end of '57 – is of course still with us, though long past her jet-set days now that she’s just Trujillo’s widow.
WWII veteran John Stephenson made his TV debut in '53, on My Little Margie; he then acted on half-a-dozen different shows in '54 before playing Roger Crutcher on The People’s Choice in '55 and '56 and '57; he otherwise beat the OP’s deadline on everything from Dragnet to Perry Mason before spending all those years in the '60s voicing Mister Slate on The Flintstones.
(His voice acting work pretty much runs the comic-book gamut: he was Professor X in an X-MEN cartoon, and Doctor Doom in a FANTASTIC FOUR cartoon, and Uncle Ben in a SPIDER-MAN cartoon; and he was Benton Quest on JONNY QUEST, and General Hawk on GI JOE – and even Marvin, on SUPERFRIENDS – and, well, you name it: when he wasn’t voicing Magneto or Doctor Strange, he was Bionic-1 of THE BIONIC SIX.)
In looking up stuff for a thread on magic, I remembered pioneer TV magician Mark Wilson. While his first IMDb credit is from 1960, he was doing local and then regional TV starting in 1955.
Charles Braverman was acting on TV back in '57, but by the '60s he’d transitioned to working as a cinematographer with young director George Lucas; Braverman went on to earn directing credits of his own in the '70s and '80s and '90s and '00s – picking up an Oscar nomination along the way – and now exclusively plays producer here in the '10s; his most recent project hit screens earlier this year.
Tony winner Ann Wedgeworth has a long line of television credits stretching back from Evening Shade in the '90s to Roseanne in the '80s to Three’s Company in the '70s to Another World in the '60s, all the way back to Kraft Theatre in '57; her most recent acting credit was a little Sundance movie with Paul Giamatti and Michelle Williams.
Back in '54, Eugene Mazzola was acting on Medic and Passport to Danger; in '55, he was on The Lone Wolf and Stage 7; in '56, The Loretta Young Show and Conflict; in '57, Broken Arrow and Wagon Train; and so on through the rest of the '50s, as well as the '60s (Rawhide, Bonanza) and '70s (To Rome With Love, Streets of San Francisco).
He also started picking up assistant director credits in the '70s – and kept picking up assistant director credits in the '80s and '90s and '00s – such that he’s currently working as an assistant director on a movie set to come out next year.
Yvonne Fedderson had a recurring role on The George Burns And Gracie Allen Show in '57, the same year she carried on with her Father Knows Best recurring role from '56 (which she then kept at in '58 and '59). And she was otherwise plenty busy before the cut-off date, acting on The Adventures of Jim Bowie and The Hardy Boys when she wasn’t up on the big screen with Michael Landon in I Was A Teenage Werewolf or alongside Burt Lancaster and Katharine Hepburn in The Rainmaker.
She’s since been nominated for the Nobel Prize a whole bunch of times.
Barbara Luna is probably most famous as Marlena Moreau from the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of Star Trek, which came on the heels of assorted small-screen work in the '50s – on Mike Hammer and Perry Mason and The Untouchables and Hawaiian Eye, plus a recurring role on Zorro as Theresa Modesto – after her TV debut in '54.
After making his TV debut in '52 on Racket Squad, Bobby Clark acted on various westerns – Tales of the Texas Rangers, Tales of Wells Fargo, Zane Grey Theater – before spending '56 and '57 as a regular on Casey Jones; his other pre-1958 credits run the gamut from Screen Directors Playhouse to, well, The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse.
Julia Meade made her TV acting debut in '52, on Lux Video Theatre, before appearing on everything from The Ed Sullivan Show to Goodyear Playhouse to Your Hit Parade prior to the end of '57, after which she of course made the rounds on Playhouse 90 and To Tell The Truth and et cetera.
Long before she was acting on hundreds of Peyton Place episodes, Patricia Morrow was on I Led 3 Lives in 1954 and 1955 and 1956 before spending 1957 appearing on General Electric Theater with Frank Gorshin and a TV movie with Mary Martin.
Back before becoming the mother of Lorenzo Lamas, Arlene Dahl was of course busily performing on The Colgate Comedy Hour and The Frank Sinatra Show in 1951, followed by getting work on The Bob Hope Show and Your Show of Shows in 1952, followed by hosting The Pepsi-Cola Playhouse in 1953 and 1954, followed by acting on Lux Video Theatre and The Ford Television Theatre in 1955, and otherwise making the rounds on What’s My Line and The Milton Berle Show and et cetera.
After doing movies in the '40s with Fred Astaire and Elizabeth Taylor and et cetera, Sara Shane made her television debut in '52 on Crown Theatre With Gloria Swanson before doing I Led 3 Lives in '53, Lux Video Theatre in '54, The Great Gildersleeve in '55, and the Johnny Moccasin TV movie in '56 – after which you could see her on Dragnet and The Bob Cummings Show in '57.