What Happened To The Cast Of Leave It To Beaver After The Finale?

There may be no more archetypical American family sitcom than “Leave it to Beaver.” Even character names became archetypes, as “Ward Cleaver” instantly connotes a firm-but-fair perfect father, and a June Cleaver type would be assumed a wholesomely beautiful housewife and mother. Family problems, drawn from the writers’ real lives, usually proved solvable, and the Cleaver clan generally provided the model of the family that the viewer would like to have.

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As conventional as its drama may have been, the show did break new ground. It was the first prime-time series to specifically create a series finale episode, and said finale was also one of the earliest clip-show sitcom episodes (it was preceded by at least one other, an “I Love Lucy” Christmas Special). In the last episode, “Family Scrapbook,” the Cleavers look at old stills from prior episodes and remember highlights from the show, including many of the major supporting characters, like Wally’s obnoxious pal Eddie Haskell. Ward and June also finally revealed the origin of Theodore’s “Beaver” nickname.

Through six seasons with 39 episodes each, at a time when there were only three major TV networks, the cast of “Leave it to Beaver” became so familiar to American families that it proved tough for them to get different roles after the show ended. There was value in the brand, and most returned for revivals, but let’s look at what else happened to the “Leave It to Beaver” cast following the final episode.

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When the show ended, Jerry Mathers did what every boy his age usually does: He went to high school and probably headed off a lot of potential teasing by embracing his past, fronting a band called Beaver and the Trappers. Afterward, he joined the California Air National Guard, and though a rumor spread that he was killed in the Vietnam War, he never actually left the country while in service. After getting a BA in philosophy at UC Berkeley, he worked in banking, real estate, and radio, ultimately returning to acting on the dinner theater circuit.

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In 1983, CBS brought Mathers and his surviving costars back for the TV movie “Still the Beaver,” which spawned a new series initially called “Still the Beaver” for one season on The Disney Channel, and subsequently as “The New Leave It to Beaver” for three more seasons on CBS. It depicted Beaver as a divorced dad, and arguably set a precedent we need to stop.

Mathers’ acting career since then has mostly been in cameos on other shows to allow him to spend more family time. He’s been a spokesman for the National Psoriasis Foundation, and the first male spokesman for the Jenny Craig weight loss program. In the ’90s, he briefly ran a catering company called “Cleaver’s Catering.” More recently, he’s been writing a book about his weight-loss journey.

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His son Noah is a professional sound mixer, mostly on documentary and reality shows like “Coast Guard Alaska.”

Hugh Beaumont’s good-guy image was more than a TV portrayal, as he was also a Methodist minister with a Masters in theology from USC and a conscientious objector during World War II, serving as a medic rather than in combat. Prior to playing Ward, he was best-known for playing Brett Halliday’s detective character Michael Shayne in five films. The character is almost always broke because he won’t accept morally ambiguous cases, and often works pro bono. Beaumont didn’t believe in compromising his morality as a clergyman if an acting role required it. Though he did not appear in the original “Leave It to Beaver” pilot, both Ward and Wally were promptly recast, and Beaumont became famous for the role. He also got to direct several episodes, and even write one.

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After “Leave It to Beaver” ended, he mostly guested on other shows, like “Wagon Train” (above) and “Mannix.” As acting work dried up, he moved to Minnesota and started a Christmas tree-selling business. Following a major stroke in 1970, he officially retired from acting. Though he did appear in 1980 as part of a cast reunion on L.A. local TV news, he died of a heart attack a year before the release of “Still the Beaver,” which was dedicated to him.

Barbara Billingsley had previously been a regular on the single-season “Professional Father.” On “Leave It to Beaver,” she brought her real life love of pearl necklaces to June Cleaver, as she thought they helped conceal and light a hollow in her neck. It became a running joke among some viewers that the character did household chores in heels, but the heels were to compensate for the fact that Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow were growing fast, and she didn’t want to look too short.

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When the show ended, Billingsley stayed in touch with Mathers as a mentor, but she didn’t do much acting for the next 17 years, with the exception of playing two different characters on two separate episodes of “The FBI.” In 1980, however, she experienced a career resurgence after appearing in “Airplane!” — which is still hilarious after 40 years — as the passenger who’s able to speak Jive (above). 

Old enough to no longer be stereotyped as June, she began working regularly again and gained a whole new generation of fans as the voice of Nanny on the animated “Muppet Babies” spinoff that came directly from “The Muppet Movie.” Billingsley nonetheless reprised her most famous role on “Still the Beaver” and its subsequent series, and she was also one of three actors from the original series to make a cameo in the 1997 “Leave It to Beaver” movie, as Aunt Martha. (The other two were Ken Osmond as Eddie Haskell Sr., and Frank Bank as Frank.)

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She died in 2010, aged 94.

Tony Dow was an aspiring championship swimmer when he got the role of Wally, due to the previous actor in the pilot growing too tall, too fast. During the course of “Leave It to Beaver,” he became a teen heartthrob, and he had the right look to keep acting thereafter, most notably starring in “Never Too Young,” the first daytime soap aimed at teenagers. Like Mathers, he also joined the California National Guard during the Vietnam War, serving primarily as a photographer.

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After the war, he worked construction while still dabbling in acting, playing Wally again in parody form for a sketch in “The Kentucky Fried Movie.” When he returned to the role full-time for “Still the Beaver,” he tried his hand at writing and directing and took to it, becoming a TV director on shows that frequently had a sci-fi or fantasy bent, like “Babylon 5,” “Swamp Thing,” and the TV spinoffs of “Harry and the Hendersons” and “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” This also led him to an interest in special effects, which he supervised on “Babylon 5” and the flop Paul McGann “Doctor Who” TV movie. He also came close to directing “The Line Kings,” a comedy movie about “Star Wars” fans battling to be first in line for the next film.

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Later in life he became a bronze sculptor. He also battled clinical depression and appeared in self-help videos about beating it. Sadly, he died of liver cancer in 2022 at the age of 77.

Eddie Haskell was supposed to be just another of many one-off TV roles for Ken Osmond, but the character proved popular, and he became a regular. With his unfailing politeness to adults and duplicity behind their backs, Eddie became an iconic sitcom character, so much so that Osmond found himself mostly unable to get any subsequent acting work. Though he did score an uncredited cameo in Doris Day’s final film, “With Six You Get Eggroll,” he wanted to be able to buy a house, so he joined the LAPD, growing a mustache to avoid being recognized as Eddie while in uniform. Towards the end of the show, he had previously served in the Army Reserve.

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During the time he was away from acting, Osmond was the subject of two major rumors. One was that he was actually shock rocker Alice Cooper, based on a misreported quote from Cooper. Another was that he had become porn star John Holmes, which was so pervasive was that he had to confront a theater and bookstore wrongly promoting it.

After being shot three times in the line of duty, he eventually got a full pension and retired from the force, right as “Still the Beaver” arrived to allow him to return as Eddie, along with his two real-life sons, Eric and Christian, playing Eddie’s sons. After that show ran its course, he continued to make cameos and special appearances before his death from COPD complications in 2020, aged 76.

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Robert “Rusty” Stevens was selling newspapers on a street corner when a talent scout named Lola Moore spotted him. He’d been doing that job for 10 months, then all of a sudden he found himself playing the Beaver’s friend and schoolmate Larry. It led to further gigs on shows like “77 Sunset Strip” and “The Rifleman,” but his acting career ended abruptly in 1963. He had left “Leave It to Beaver” three years earlier, and according to Barbara Billingsley, it was because his mother proved to be an unbearable stage mom. His family then moved to Philadelphia.

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Jerry Mathers spent years looking for Rusty, personally wanting him to come back for “Still the Beaver.” He found him selling car insurance in New Jersey. Briefly returning to acting to play Larry in the pilot and three subsequent episodes, he returned to selling insurance afterward. As of this writing, he is still alive in his mid-70s, but this time, he and Mathers have stayed in touch as two of only three major actors left alive from the show.

Pamela Beaird, who simplified her last name to “Baird” for her acting career, was part of a teenage harmony group called the Holly-Tones in the 1950s, along with her cousins Deanna and Joyce. Her first credited acting role came on “The 20th Century Fox Hour,” an anthology show that featured shortened remakes of stories from popular Fox movies. After many appearances on shows including “Father Knows Best,” “My Friend Flicka,” and “Bachelor Father,” she landed her best-known role as Wally Cleaver’s girlfriend, Mary Ellen. When the show ended, she mostly disappeared from acting following a 1964 appearance on “Perry Mason.”

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In 1973, she married Texan gospel singer Robert Hensley, who had previously been a TV western actor under the name of Bob Henry and a singer using the alias Jericho Brown (not to be confused with the Pulitzer-winning poet of the same name). After he became born again, Hensley founded a ministry, and he met Beaird at a Hollywood Christian Group. They had five children, and toured the country as a family for 12 years, singing religious songs, founding churches, and preaching the Bible. Hensley used to joke that he “stole Mary Ellen Rogers from Wally Cleaver.”

Hensley died in 2016, and Beaird, now 80, survives him. 

Born Marion Burnside Randall, the actress who became best known as Beaver’s eminently crushable teacher got her first major break on the daytime drama “Valiant Lady,” as the third actress to play the role of Diane Emerson Soames. Her only movie role came shortly thereafter, in a supporting role in the Katharine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy rom-com “Desk Set” (above). Many single-episode TV appearances followed, on the likes of “The Rifleman,” “Gunsmoke,” and three different characters on “77 Sunset Strip,” before “Leave it To Beaver” in 1958. Her acting career continued in the same vein for about a decade thereafter, with the highlight being six episodes of the anthology “Death Valley Days” as multiple characters.

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She retired from acting in 1967, moving to Philadelphia two years later to work in an administrative role for charitable organizations, among them the Multiple Sclerosis Telethon, Reading for the Blind, and Project Headstart. Sadly, Randall died of lung cancer at the age of 49, possibly due to her heavy smoking habit. She donated her body to medical science, through the Humanity Gifts Registry of Philadelphia.

The TV mother of Beaver’s bud Larry may have the most interesting story. Madge Blake didn’t start her acting career until age 50, prior to which she and her husband James Lincoln Blake worked on the Manhattan Project, testing equipment and working on construction of the detonator for the original atomic bomb. They received a citation from the government.

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Following an uncredited small role in “An American in Paris,” she befriended Gene Kelly, who put her in most of his films thereafter, notably as gossip columnist Dora Bailey in “Singin’ in the Rain” (above). Following “Leave It to Beaver,” she appeared in multiple roles on “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and “The Danny Thomas Show.” She was a regular cast member on “The Joey Bishop Show” and “The Real McCoys” before scoring her most famous role as Aunt Harriet on the 1966 “Batman” series and movie. The character had first appeared in Detective Comics #328, but the TV show fleshed her out and added canonical details, like her surname of Cooper. At one point, rumor had it the producers tried to fire her from the show, but Adam West refused to let them, so she baked him a fresh cake as thanks.

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She left the show during the third and final season as her health failed, with her final role being in the soap-spoofing TV movie “Hastings Corner.” Blake died of a heart attack in 1969 at age 69.