J. Clarke articles

Television can make a place feel inseparable from one series, but studios know a useful set is too valuable to waste. Houses, schools, diners and entire streets have been repainted, rearranged and sent back before cameras as someplace new. Sometimes viewers barely noticed.

Casting asks audiences to believe plenty, but some screen families require unusually generous suspension of disbelief. Across movies and television, performers have played parents to co-stars separated from them by barely a decade, only a few years, or sometimes virtually no age gap at all.

Charlene Tilton became one of Dallas’s most recognizable young faces as Lucy Ewing, the restless granddaughter of the wealthy Ewing clan. Off-screen, Tilton had already endured years of instability, and she was still a teenager when the show changed her life.

Long before Barbara Bel Geddes became television’s Miss Ellie Ewing, she had already built a career in theater and film. She was a Broadway award winner, an RKO contract player, an Academy Award nominee, and a frequent collaborator with major directors before Dallas began in 1978 and brought her widest television fame.

TV casting can make two performers seem perfectly matched even when their birthdays tell another story. Here, the gap refers to the actors’ real ages, not necessarily their characters’ ages. Some shows acknowledged the difference; others barely made it part of the relationship at all. In several cases, the woman was the older performer, which makes the casting even more interesting.

Gary Owens was the kind of performer viewers recognized before they knew his name. On Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, his baritone and hand-to-ear announcer pose became part of the show’s identity. Yet that famous booth was only one stop in a career spanning radio, cartoons, game shows, children’s television, commercials, and network specials.