Barbara Perry

Barbara Perry (June 22, 1921 – May 5, 2019) was an American actress, singer and dancer who worked for 84 years in Hollywood and on Broadway.

Norfolk, Virginia-born Perry began her film career in 1933, when she appeared in Counsellor at Law. She also had a small part in The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 1935. She performed on Broadway in various productions, including playing Anna in Rumple in 1957. In 1950 she was Mrs. Larry in Happy as Larry on Broadway.

By the mid-1950s to the early-1960s, she had studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, England, while performing opposite George Formby, Warde Donovan, and Sara Gregory in Zip Goes a Million at the Hippodrome and Palace Theatres, and upon her return to the USA had started appearing in numerous television series such as Perry Mason,The Donna Reed Show, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, and The Dick Van Dyke Show, where she played Buddy Sorrell's wife Pickles, before being replaced by Joan Shawlee.

In 1981, Perry wrote and performed in Passionate Ladies, a one-woman Broadway show at the Bijou Theatre. Her other Broadway plays included Swan Song (1946), If the Shoe Fits (1946), Happy as Larry (1950), and Rumple (1957). She also played Thelma Brockwood on The Hathaways. Perry's last known role was in the television series Baskets in 2017, meaning that her film/television career spanned extraordinary 84 years.

Perry was first married to Bennett Warren James, with whom she had a daughter, from 1953–1965. The union ended in divorce. Her second marriage was to animator Art Babbitt on April 14, 1967, in Hollywood, California, until his death in 1992. They had no children.

Barbara Perry died on May 5, 2019, in Los Angeles at the age of 97.