‘BEVERLY HILLBILLY’ DONNA DOUGLAS WAS BOLD WITNESS FOR CHRIST ans feature
Written by Mark Ellis
Donna
Douglas, the curly blonde bumpkin actress who played Elly May Clampett
with infectious Southern charm on “The Beverly Hillbillies,” has passed
to her reward. She was 81.
She
graduated to heaven on the first day of the new year surrounded by
friends and family following a battle with pancreatic cancer, according
to news sources.
“The
Beverly Hillbillies,” a comedy about a backwoods family who moved to
Beverly Hills after striking it rich from their Ozarks oil well became
an immediate hit when it first aired on CBS in 1962.
The
series starred Buddy Ebsen as patriarch Jed, Irene Ryan as Granny, Max
Baer Jr. as Jethro and Douglas as Elly May, a backwoods bombshell with
pigtails, and tight jeans usually cinched with a rope belt.
The Beverly Hillbillies
“She
had a heart for the Lord,” says Sandy Barnett, who heard her speak and
share her Christian testimony a few months ago at Calvary Missionary
Baptist Church in Henderson, Kentucky. “She is walking through those
pearly gates right now.”
Prior
to the show’s start in the early ‘60s, Douglas had very little acting
experience and had never traveled very far from her home, which was
outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
While
she never planned to be an actress, “That’s just how my life has
unfolded,” she told the Lincoln Times-News. “You gradually move into
what your life’s supposed to be.”
When
she graduated high school, she considered herself to be naïve,
idealistic, shy and awkward. An early marriage ended in divorce and
produced one son, whom she sent to live with her parents while she went
to New York to pursue a career.
“I
had never been away from home,” she told the Times-News. “I grew up
poor. My parents didn’t have a car. Inever had a background for show
business.”
She
recalled her first airplane flight north when a man at the New Orleans
airport asked if she wanted to change her plane reservation so that she
could arrive at her destination an hour earlier.
“I didn’t even know they had two airports in New York,” she said.
Despite the fact that she was brought up in a Christian home, she wasn’t very strong in her faith.
“I loved Jesus, but I didn’t know the Word of God,” she told the Times-News.
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