Betty McGuire, a Broadway performer who played the grandmother on ABC’s “Growing Pains” in six of its seven seasons, has died at 100. McGuire died of natural causes on Oct. 8 at the Motion Picture & Television Fund’s Wasserman Campus in Woodland Hills, California, where she had lived since 2017. News of her death emerged 10 days later, when family friend Keith Gerchak, an actor and co-founder of Double G Films, confirmed it to The Hollywood Reporter. She had no survivors.
Born March 20, 1926, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, McGuire built a stage career that lasted about seven decades. She made her Broadway debut in 1955 as Rebecca in the musical “Plain and Fancy,” then returned in “Happy Hunting” in 1956 and “Oh, Captain!” in 1958. Those productions placed her alongside Ethel Merman, Barbara Cook, Bea Arthur and Tony Randall. She also toured in “Auntie Mame,” “Gypsy” and “Oliver!”
Television gave her a far wider audience. From 1986 to 1991, McGuire played Kate Malone, mother of Joanna Kerns’ character Maggie Seaver, in 12 episodes of “Growing Pains.” She appeared in every season but one. Gordon Jump played her on-screen husband, Ed.
Her screen résumé stretched well beyond the Seaver household. She turned up on “The Doris Day Show,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Columbo,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Moonlighting,” “Falcon Crest,” “MacGyver,” “ER,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and “CSI: Miami.” In 1978, she played Sister Mary Quacker in Cheech & Chong’s “Up in Smoke” and a nurse in Michael Crichton’s medical thriller “Coma.”
McGuire spent her later years in service work. She volunteered as a receptionist and advocate at the Coalition for Economic Survival, a Los Angeles legal clinic that helps low-income tenants facing eviction. The retirement campus where she lived, run by the Motion Picture & Television Fund, houses longtime members of the entertainment industry. McGuire stayed there for the final nine years of her life.
