Q Whatever happened to the actress who played the mother on Dallas? I remember her as a young woman in the movies.
—Barbara Jackson, Eldorado, Texas
Barbara Bel Geddes was a star on stage and screen long before she landed the role of the Ewing family matriarch on Dallas in 1978. A Broadway sensation in the late 1940s, she appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1951 and went on to memorable roles in the movies Panic in the Street, Vertigo and The Five Pennies. A longtime smoker, she died of lung cancer in 2005 at the age of 82.
