Hazel Cast Then and Now 2026 | Is Anyone Still Alive Today? H

The cast of Hazel played the happiest household on television. Off camera, the story turned far darker. A young child actor drowned at 21. The radio star who played the snob died of cancer. 10 of these 12 people are gone, and Hazel led them there. Number one, and the only name the marquee ever needed.

By the time she died, Shirley Booth had been a widow for 41 years, nearly blind, recovering from a broken hip, and living alone in a quiet house on Cape Cod. The role most people remember her for was, by her own account, a job she accepted largely to pay for an old age she would spend almost entirely by herself.

On screen, she was Hazel Burke, the maid who ran the Baxter household better than her employer ran his office. Away from that maid, Booth was one of the most admired stage actresses in the country. She reached Broadway in 1925, opposite a young Humphrey Bogart, and spent decades earning a level of respect that television could never match.

Booth remains one of barely two dozen performers to win the triple crown of acting, with an Academy Award, two Emmys, and three Tony Awards. And she was the first actress to take both an Oscar and a Tony for a single role. Her one great love was her second husband, William Baker, who died in 1951 after only eight years together.

She chose never to marry again. Across the entire run of Hazel and the long years that followed, she lived alone, and her health quietly failed until she died at home in North Chatham, Massachusetts, in October 1992, at 94. She was laid to rest at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, beside the husband she had outlived by more than four decades.

Hazel was the cheerful center of a crowded family home. Shirley Booth, who gave that maid her warmth, spent her own final decades in near silence. For our second story, consider what it means to be fired from your own hit show. After four seasons of strong ratings, the network decided Don DeFore cost too much, and he was written out and shipped, on paper, to a job in the Middle East.

The chemistry that had carried the series for four years vanished, and the show lasted only one more season without him. DeFore played George Baxter, the successful attorney who commanded his law office and lost nearly every argument at home. Long before Hazel, he was already a household face as the friendly neighbor Thorny on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, a role that earned him an Emmy nomination.

His life away from the camera was steadier than almost anyone else on this list. He married Marion Holmes in 1942 and stayed married to her until his death, more than 50 years later, raising five children together in a business where lasting marriages were rare. For a stretch around the turn of the 1960s, he even ran a barbecue restaurant at Disneyland, and he served a term as president of the Television Academy.

One detail reframes the man entirely. Offscreen, while his character was supposedly losing every battle of wills with the maid, DeFore was quietly protecting his co-star, working as early as 1964 to lighten Shirley Booth’s schedule and guard her failing health. He died of cardiac arrest in Santa Monica in December 1993 at 80 and was buried at Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park in Los Angeles.

George Baxter spent every episode pretending to run his household. Don DeFore spent those same years quietly looking after the woman the whole show depended on. Third, a woman who turned her own divorce into one of television’s most important sitcoms and was then told she was too old to play the lead. Whitney Blake co-created One Day at a Time, the story of a single mother raising two daughters, directly from her own years raising three children alone.

She wanted to star in it herself. The producers decided that at 49, she was too old to play the mother of teenagers, and the part went to someone else. On Hazel, she had played Dorothy Baxter, the graceful interior decorator and wife of George. Blake came from an unusual home. Her father was a United States Secret Service agent who had once guarded President Woodrow Wilson, and she attended 16 different schools as the family moved around the country.

Her personal life ran through three marriages. The first to a radio announcer named Tom Baxter gave her three children, including the future Family Ties star Meredith Baxter, before it ended in divorce. By a strange coincidence, her real married name matched her character’s surname on the show. Her third marriage to the writer Allan Manings became the creative partnership that defined her later career.

The two of them building One Day at a Time Together. Blake was dropped from Hazel alongside Don DeFore when the budget was cut, and her on-camera roles slowed afterward. She moved behind the camera instead, and found a second life as a writer and producer. In September 2002, she died of esophageal cancer at her home in Edgartown, on Martha’s Vineyard, at 76.

Her body was cremated and her ashes were given to her family, so she has no public grave. Dorothy Baxter was the picture of a contented 1960s housewife. Whitney Blake wrote the show that finally told the truth about the women who were anything but. The next name is the one this whole story has been moving toward, and it belongs to a boy who was only nine when the cameras first rolled.

The fourth name is the hardest to tell. At 21, Bobby Buntrock was driving to a friend’s house near Keystone, South Dakota, when his car slid off a bridge and dropped into the water below. A flood 2 years earlier had torn a hole in that bridge and nobody had ever repaired it, leaving no barricades and no warning signs.

He fought to force the door open against the rushing water, could not move it, and drowned before divers ever reached the car. On Hazel, he had been Harold Baxter, the blond little boy at the heart of the household. He was nine when the show began and 13 when it ended. His life after the cameras was quiet and short.

Bobby Buntrock left acting behind in 1967, moved to South Dakota with his family, graduated from high school, and joined the National Guard. He lost his mother Maxine in the summer of 1972, less than 2 years before his own death. So, grief had already visited that family once before the bridge took him. When the news reached Shirley Booth, the woman who had played his on-screen protector, she was shattered.

The two of them had grown close during the show and she never fully shook the loss of the boy. Bobby Buntrock was laid to rest at Keystone Cemetery in Keystone, South Dakota, beneath a simple stone that fans still visit, leaving flowers and small toys for a child who never grew old. Harold Baxter was the safest, most protected boy on television, watched over by a maid who let nothing touch him.

Bobby Buntrock died at 21 because the adults in a real town let a broken bridge stand. If you grew up watching Harold and Hazel together, the truth about that little boy may be the hardest fact in this entire video. Tell me in the comments whether you ever knew what really happened to him. Number five is alive today and the reason she is alive is the reason most people remember her.

At 35, Ann Jillian was told she had breast cancer and she underwent a double mastectomy. 11 days after the surgery, she went back to work. Then she did something almost no star of her era would have dared. She turned her own diagnosis into a television film and put the whole ordeal on national screens so that other women facing the same news would have a reason to hope.

On Hazel, she was Millie Ballard, the bright teenage secretary in the Baxter story lines of the final seasons. She was already a seasoned child performer by then, fluent in Lithuanian and once renamed at Walt Disney’s own suggestion from Nousta to Jillian. Her early career nearly stalled in cruel fashion. After her child roles, she was told she was too tall to play young parts and too young to play a leading lady, and the work dried up so completely that she spent years voicing cartoons just to stay employed.

Her comeback arrived on Broadway opposite Mickey Rooney, and then as the sharp-tongued waitress Cassie Cranston on the sitcom It’s a Living. The cancer reshaped her whole life. She married her manager, Andy Mersky, a former Chicago police officer, and in 1992 at 42, she gave birth to a son, becoming the first known celebrity to survive breast cancer and then have a child.

Jillian stepped back from acting to raise that boy and to campaign for cancer research. And in 2015, she was inducted into the National Lithuanian American Hall of Fame. As of 2026, she is 76. Millie Ballard was a small forgettable part in a fading sitcom. And Jillian became one of the bravest public faces breast cancer ever had.

Our sixth story ended far too soon. Cancer took Kathy Lewis in November 1968, only 2 years after Hazel left the air, and she was just 51. The same disease that two of her co-stars would also face reached her first, and it cut down one of the most respected voices American radio ever produced. On Hazel, she had played Deirdre Thompson, George’s haughty sister, the social climber who looked down on Hazel for being a maid.

Lewis made the snobbery so sharp that the character kept coming back, almost a regular. Long before that, she was radio royalty. She began as a band singer with Kay Kyser, moved into Chicago radio drama, and built a career of staggering range with more than 100 episodes of the thriller series Suspense alone.

Her signature role was Jane Stacy, the level-headed best friend and narrator of the hit comedy My Friend Irma, a part she played for years on both radio and television. Off the air, her marriage was a partnership of equals in a punishing business. In 1943, she married Elliott Lewis, one of radio’s most respected writers and producers, and the two collaborated on shows together.

They had no children, and the marriage ended in divorce in 1958, a decade before her death. She succumbed to cancer in Hollywood in 1968 and was laid to rest at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. Deirdre Thompson was the coldest, cruelest snob the show ever produced. Kathy Lewis, who gave her that ice, was in real life one of the warmest and most admired professionals in the business.

Seventh on this list, and stranger than any script, the most famous scene of Lynn Borden’s film career has her trapped in the mud and killed by a snapping turtle. The film was the low-budget horror picture Frogs, and that image trailed her for the rest of her life, an odd footnote for a woman who had been a beauty queen and a serious painter.

On Hazel, she had played Barbara Baxter, the warm sister-in-law brought in for the final season. She joined a retooled cast that loyal fans resented, and the show ended after a single year. Her path to Hollywood ran through pageants and art. The daughter of a syndicated cartoonist, she was enrolled in acting classes as a child to cure her shyness, was crowned Miss Arizona in 1957, and reached the top 10 at the Miss America pageant the next year.

Away from the screen, she painted seriously, and her canvases hung in galleries across the country. Two marriages shaped her personal life. The first to a man named Chris Borden ended in divorce. The second to Roger Brunel in 1982 lasted to the end of her days. She had no children, and when she died in March 2015 in Encino, California at 77, she was survived by her husband and her brother.

Her body was cremated, and her ashes were given to her family, so there is no headstone to visit. Barbara Baxley was the gentle newcomer who tried to keep a fading show afloat. Lynn Borden was a painter and a pageant winner whose best known moment on film is being killed by a turtle. The next name almost did not live past 19, and it happened far from any sound stage on a tour through a war zone.

Number eight nearly died at 19, and not from anything Hollywood did to her. While entertaining American troops on a USO tour in Korea, Mala Powers contracted a blood disease, and the drug given to treat it triggered a reaction that destroyed much of her bone marrow. She barely survived. Her recovery stretched across nine long months, and that brush with death came only a year after the role that had made her name.

On Hazel, she had played Mona Williams, one of the new neighbors woven into the revamped final season. By then, she had been acting since childhood with her first film at the age of 11. Her breakthrough had come at 18 when the producer Stanley Kramer cast her as Roxane opposite Jose Ferrer in the 1950 film Cyrano de Bergerac, a performance that earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

The illness in Korea interrupted everything that promise had built. Yet, she returned and worked steadily for decades more. Teaching became deepest passion of her later years. She had trained directly under Michael Chekhov, the nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov, grew close to him, and after his death was named the guardian of his estate, spending her final decades publishing his books and teaching his acting method.

Powers married twice, and her second husband, the publisher Hughes Miller, died in 1989. In June 2007, after a university lecture tour, she died of leukemia in Burbank, California at 75. Her funeral was held at the Old North Church at Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, where she was laid to rest. Mona Williams was a minor neighbor in a show running out of road.

Mala Powers survived a death sentence at 19 and spent her life keeping another artist’s work alive. If these are the stories you came for, the ones the tribute reels always skip, take a second to subscribe so the next forgotten cast does not slip past you. The ninth name buried three husbands. Maudie Prickett married three times across her life, and she outlived every one of them, watching each marriage end not in divorce, but at a graveside.

Her first husband died in 1954, her second a year after she married him in 1961, and her third in 1971, leaving her a widow three times over before her own death. On Hazel, she had played Rosie, Hazel’s fellow maid and closest friend, loyal but fiercely competitive whenever an eligible bachelor came near. Prickett was a working character actress with more than 300 credits to her name.

Her face was one of the most familiar in American television without her name ever being known. She played maids, nosey neighbors, spinsters, and prim school teachers in show after show, and she turned up as the maid Elsie in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. Prickett even left a small mark on comedy history because Jonathan Winters named his famous old lady character Granny Frickert partly in tribute to her.

Each of those marriages tied her to a notable man. Her first husband helped found the Pasadena Playhouse before becoming a surgeon and her last served as mayor of Pasadena. In April 1976 at 61, Prickett died of kidney failure in Pasadena, California. She was laid to rest at Mountain View Cemetery and Mausoleum in nearby Altadena.

Rosie was the cheerful gossiping best friend who always had Hazel’s back. Maudie Prickett spent her real life burying the men she loved one after another and kept working through every loss. 10th, a man who once dreamed of singing opera. Howard Smith trained as a concert singer and set his hopes on the opera stage and then the First World War took that dream away when he served in the infantry and came home to a door already closed.

He turned to acting instead and built a 50-year run across vaudeville theater, radio, film, and television. On Hazel, he had played Harvey Griffin, George Baxter’s gruff demanding client, the blustering businessman Hazel always managed to disarm. Smith was a stage veteran whose bluster carried real weight. His finest hour came on Broadway in a role that still matters.

He created the part of Charlie in the original 1949 production of Death of a Salesman standing beside Willy Loman in one of the defining plays of the American theater and he carried that role into the 1951 film. Years earlier, he had even taken part in Orson Welles’s notorious War of the Worlds radio broadcast.

Widowhood shadowed his final years. His wife, the actress and singer Lillian Boardman, died in 1953 and he lived his last 15 years without her. In January 1968, Smith died in Hollywood after a heart attack at 74. His body was cremated and his ashes were carried east and interred at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York, far from the city where he died.

Harvey Griffin was a one-note comic blowhard, the client who existed to be outwitted. Howard Smith was the actor who first gave Charlie a voice in one of the greatest American plays of his century. The next name is one of only two people in this story still living and she came far closer to death than the cameras ever suggested.

Number 11 is one of only two people in this story still alive and she came close to not being. Decades after the show ended, Julia Benjamin lived through a personal crisis so severe that she would later call it the thing that nearly ended her life, a long fall through hardship and a hard climb back out. Out of respect, the private details belong to her and she has told them in her own words, in her own time.

I On Hazel, she had played Susie Baxter, the precocious young cousin added to the household in the final season. Shirley Booth personally chose her for the part when she was 8 years old. Her childhood in the business began even earlier at 6:00 as the daughter of a Hollywood casting director. The role of Susie was the high point of a career that faded quickly afterward.

She took only a handful of parts in the years that followed with guest spots on My Three Sons and The Rockford Files and a last television appearance in 1984. What she did with the rest of her life is the real story. She survived what she went through, found her footing again, and eventually wrote a memoir about her Hazel years and the dark road that came after turning a near-fatal chapter into a record of survival.

Today she works as a voice artist and as of 2026 she is 69. Susie Baxter was a happy little girl in a sitcom about a happy home. Julia Benjamin grew up to write a book whose true subject is not fame at all, but the sheer will to keep living. The last name on this list owed his Hollywood career to a single compliment.

Ray Fulmer was acting in a Chicago stage production opposite Katherine Crosby when her husband Bing Crosby saw his work and praised him to film producers. And those few words opened doors that years of effort had not. He rode that break into television and decades later closed his career selling self-help programs on late-night infomercials.

On Hazel, he had played Steve Baxter, George’s younger brother, the real estate man who took Hazel and Harold in. Fulmer was 32 when he stepped into the revamped show. His road to that role ran through good schools and the stage. He studied at Boston College and the American Theatre Wing, served in the Army, and earned his start on Broadway in Auntie Mame before the Crosby endorsement changed everything.

Of his famous co-star, he spoke with real admiration, marveling that Shirley Booth could make something out of nothing. The later chapters of his life grew quiet. After Hazel, he moved into daytime soap operas, played roles on Guiding Light and Somerset, made his final acting appearance in 1992, and then took up hosting infomercials for the motivational speaker Tony Robbins.

He married twice, and both marriages ended without children. In February 2013, Fulmer died in Newport Beach, California at 79 after an undisclosed illness, and the details of his burial were never made public. Steve Baxter was the confident new man of the house, sure he could handle the maid his brother could not.

Ray Fulmer rose on a stranger’s kind word and slipped away so quietly that no one ever recorded where he was laid to rest. From a child’s grave in South Dakota to a hillside in New Jersey to a crypt in New York, the household that never moved is now everywhere.