I am finding it very unsettling that I was just earlier waxing poetic about Vertigo and now comes news that Barbara Bel Geddes died on Monday from lung cancer. BBG was best known as Miss Ellie on that Eighties classic oil-soap Dallas, but for me she was and always will be Midge, the gal with the ill-placed romantic longings for Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo.
She also starred in the only episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents I've ever seen, "Lamb to the Slaughter," based on the Roald Dahl short story, about a woman who, in a fit of anger, murders her husband with a leg of lamb and then cooks it up and serves it to the detectives searching for clues. A DVD set of the first season of Alfred Hitchcock Presents is being released late this Fall (it doesn't include this ep, which is in a later season), and every time I see it on my Amazon Wish List I get all tingly inside.
Anyway, BBG always seemed like a class act, and I'm extremely sad she's gone. Her final moment in Vertigo, with Stewart practically catatonic after the loss of Madeline and her efforts rebuffed and she wanders sadly down an empty hallway never to be seen in the film again, always breaks my heart.
What I don't get is why I haven't heard this anywhere and just stumbled upon a link to a story at Soap Opera Net about it. You'd think there'd be enough Dallas nostalgia to hear someone mourn Miss Ellie. I guess that news-hog Peter Jennings is getting all the dead-from-lung-cancer press this week. Or maybe Soap Net is wrong! I'll do some searching on this now.
UPDATE - The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting it as well. Sad.
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