Irene Ryan

The Business of Black-and-White Laughs

Irene Ryan was born in El Paso in 1902, and before she turned twelve she was already getting paid to perform in talent contests. Her training didn't come from drama schools but from the vaudeville circuit, where quick wit was the only way to survive the audience. There she met Tim Ryan, and together they formed a comedy duo that eventually moved to national radio thanks to Bob Hope.

But the marriage couldn't survive the pace of constant touring.

They divorced in 1942, but they kept working together for years because business came before feelings. Around that time, Ryan began working independently in B movies and supporting roles that barely covered the bills. Her face was still not familiar to the general public, but her voice already had the gravelly tone that would make her famous decades later.

An Old Woman Built with Makeup and Willpower

In 1962, she auditioned for a new CBS series titled The Beverly Hillbillies, to play the grandmother Daisy Moses. She was sixty years old at the time. But the producers were looking for someone who appeared much older and more frail to fit the stereotype of a woman from the Arkansas mountains. So Ryan pulled her hair back and wore makeup that added twenty years in one go.

And the gamble paid off.

The series stayed on the air until 1971 and brought in millions for the network. Ryan received thousands of letters from fans who believed she was really an illiterate old woman who was an expert in home remedies. She earned 50,000 dollars per episode, at a time when television salaries rarely reached those figures for a supporting actress. The success was so suffocating that she struggled to find other roles for almost a decade.

Her Final Bow on Broadway

When the series ended in 1971, many assumed she would retire to her California home to enjoy her savings. But Ryan chose to return to her roots in musical theater. In 1972, she accepted the role of Berthe in the original production of Pippin directed by Bob Fosse. She sang a song about seizing youth that got the audience actively involved in the chorus.

It was her greatest professional triumph outside of television.

In 1973, she received a Tony Award nomination for her stage work. However, she could not attend the ceremony because her health suddenly failed during a performance at the Imperial Theatre in New York. She suffered a stroke during the show and was rushed to the hospital, where she would die a few weeks later.

Her will established the creation of the Irene Ryan Acting Scholarship to fund the training of new talent in the United States. The foundation has awarded more than one million dollars in scholarships since it was launched in 1972. Irene Ryan died on April 26, 1973, at the age of seventy-one from complications of a malignant glioblastoma.