Want to know the best Barbara Bel Geddes movies? How about the worst Barbara Bel Geddes movies? Curious about Barbara Bel Geddes box office grosses or which Barbara Bel Geddes movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Barbara Bel Geddes movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well, you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Barbara Bel Geddes (1922-2005) was an Oscar® nominated American actress. She was best known for her starring role as Miss Ellie Ewing in the television series Dallas. Bel Geddes also starred as Maggie in the original Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in 1955. Her notable films included I Remember Mama (1948) and Vertigo (1958). Her IMDb page shows 33 acting credits from 1947 to 1990. This page will rank Barbara Bel Geddes movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. To do well in our overall rankings a movie has to do well at the box office, get good reviews by critics, be liked by audiences, and get some award recognition.
Barbara Bel Geddes Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Barbara Bel Geddes Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies any way you want.
- Sort Barbara Bel Geddes movies by her co-stars
- Sort Barbara Bel Geddes movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Barbara Bel Geddes movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Barbara Bel Geddes movies by how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Barbara Bel Geddes movie received.
- Sort Barbara Bel Geddes movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Barbara Bel Geddes
1. Barbara Bel Geddes was born in New York City, New York in 1922.
2. Barbara Bel Geddes came to prominence in the 1946 Broadway production of Deep Are the Roots. The performance garnered her the Clarence Derwent Award, the Theatre World Award and the Donaldson Award (forerunner of the Tony® Awards).
3. Barbara Bel Geddes began her movie career as a contract player for RKO Pictures in 1946. After she had made four movies, her contract was dropped by Howard Hughes, who had bought control of RKO in 1948, because ‘she wasn’t sexy enough.’.
4. Barbara Bel Geddes was the first and only choice for the role of Miss Ellie Ewing on Dallas (1978).
5. Barbara Bel Geddes wrote two best selling children’s books.
Check out Barbara Bel Geddes’s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
i saw 3 of top 4. 10 and favorite i remember mamma, 9s not favorites vertigo, panic in the streets (viewed under the influence of Flora and her love for Widmark, thanks again Flora).
i rarely watched Dallas. i tried to see who shot J.R. but drank to much at party to remember it. LOL. the dark college years. i did attain some notoriety in Thailand signing autographs because i lived in Dallas, Tx. when the show was popular worldwide. LOL
Hey bob cox. Your 3 tops my total of 1. I want to see I Remember Mama. I remember back in my video store days…we had a copy of Mama on Beta but not VHS, so I was unable to watch it. Very cool that you lived in Dallas Texas during the peak of Dallas I wonder how many people still have the autographs? Good stuff as always.
Cogerson, i have been to thailand twice the autograph thing happened when i was a teenager. they would want to touch me because they had never seen a tall blonde person before. the people always smiled and were polite. i dropped my wallet once and a young man chased me down to return it intact. amazing.
the second thailand trip was 20 years ago as a medical missionary. i got to know a Bangkok newspaper editor very well and i came to an understanding of their peoples that i could sense but not explain. because they are a Buddhist people they had no real understanding of forgiveness. she was saddened because of the hope i had in my forgiveness through Jesus the messiah. the constant interaction in thailand included zero expression of anger. even car crashes ended with participants bowing to each other and saying “my pen wry(sic)” which translates “that’s all right”. no harm, no foul, no forgiveness needed. each home had a shrine to worship ancestors and trees and rocks and statues. it left me very sad and her feeling her hopelessness more acutely. all covered with smiles.
my pen wry.
Hey bob cox. Awesome bob Thailand experiences. The only close thing we have experienced was when we visited the Hoover Dam. Some tourists (about 100) from an Asian country went crazy over our daughter….taking pictures of her and just wanting to see her….made us feel like we had a rock star in the stroller. Thanks for sharing this information…you have had some great experiences in your life.
“As J.R.’s mom on Dallas, Barbara Bel Geddes is known to millions. She has always been a powerful box office name on Broadway, but somehow, her film career never took definite shape. She is unquestionably gifted but has failed to develop a specific image.” – Rating the Movie Stars (book) 1983
Barbara Bel Geddes 4 Star Movie Performances – Rating The Movie Stars
1948’s I Remember Mama
1949’s Caught
1951’s Fourteen Hours
1958’s Vertigo
Queen’s song “Another One Bites The Dust” playing in background….another Joel subject has an UMR page….those needing UMR pages is dwindling and dwindling.
It follows from Part One that I only vaguely recall Barbara from a couple of her Dallas episodes. Overall therefore I can’t say that “I remember Barbara.”. However Wikipedia records for her 15 stage plays from 1941-73 and 19 TV productions from 1950 until her Dallas participation ending in 1990 when she retired completely from acting.***
IMDB credits her with 6 acting awards and 7 noms; but quotations in the public domain of her reported net worth are conflicting and in my view unreliable with for example one source saying that it was “between $1 and 5 million” at the time of her 2005 death.
It seems that sometimes the Celebrity Net Worth and other sites either can’t find or is not interested in tracking down the wealth of relatively obscure thespians though it is faithfully recorded that Thins for example left behind in today’s dollars the equivalent of 16 million at the time of her 1993 death.
***ADDITIONAL TRIVIA
“Bel Geddes retired from acting in 1990 and settled in her home in Northeast Harbor, Maine, where she continued to work as a fine artist. She was [as mentioned by Bruce in the PIF section above] the author of two children’s books I Like to Be Me and So Do I as well as the creator of a popular line of greeting cards. Looking back on her career Bel Geddes told “People”: “They’re always making me play well-bred ladies. I’m not very well bred, and I’m not much of a lady.”
Hey Bob. I guess, I am surprised you do not remember her part in Vertigo. Vertigo which is considered by many smart movie people to be the greatest movie of all-time. Thanks for sharing her information on Net Worth and her awards. I like her quote at the end. Good stuff.
She didn’t make many films so I have seen Barbara in just 3 movies: I Remember Myrna; Vertigo; and The Five Pennies. However I can’t recall her in any of those films though the latter two were big favourites of mine when they were released.
The Five Pennies was Kaye’s swan song as a top movie star. He made just 3 movies after that which had a collective Cogerson domestic gross of around $93 million – average just únder $31 million. He retired from the big screen in 1969 but Wikipedia records for him a stage play the following year [a broadway musical production called Two by Two] and 13 television appearances 1971-1986 [with 7 TV productions prior to that].
These days I watch – by far – more TV than I do cinematic movies as overall the modern cinema with its extensive emphasis on the likes of animated/action and superhero franchises does not attract me all that much [human interest ‘art house’ films like Sir Maurice Micklewhite’s Youth being one of the exceptions] but in the earlier years the reverse was always the case.
I had no more interest in for example who shot JR back then than in later years I cared about whether Rocky beat Ivan Drago or Stallone got to the top of the steps or liked waving his arms about like a scarecrow. I was never an ‘artistic snob though’ like maybe for example Joel Hirschhorn because I do remember rushing home from work in February 1983 to see both Parts 1 and 2 of Quincy’s wedding – now for me THAT was a ‘traffic-snarler’!
Hey Bob. Well your 3 looks huge compared to my one. I have only seen Vertigo. To me she was always the mom on Dallas….a show I used to watch. That show benefited from such a great villain….Larry Hagman was awesome as J.R. Thanks for the information on Danny Kaye, your changing movie habits and how Quincy’s wedding was a must see event for you. Good stuff.
HI BIG BOY. Thanks for the feedback. Theoretically I SHOULD be a big fan of Vertigo because (1) it IS a great classic (2) I like Hitch when he’s at his best (3) Jimmy is the star (4) my son did an entire paper on it for his university degree in law.
However it has lost its appeal for me over the years because I know the ending so it is not a movie that I can enthuse about watching again. Here are the other 4 of the top 5 Hitch films that interest me least out of those that I have seen in chronological order:
1/Under Capricorn – not a typical Hitchcock thriller
2/The Trouble with Archie – a very flat movie I thought and memorable to me just a marker of Shirley’s debut film [her Morning Departure if you like!]
3/The Wrong Man – devoid of Hitchcock’s trademark shocks/thrills/surprises in my perception and the title gets me thinking nowadays about your choice for this site’s resident professional film critic. However Hank IS always worth watching so I didn’t mind it first time round.
4/Myrnie – Sir Sean escaping from Bondage to expand his general filmography. Again for my money not one that was not typical Hitchcock.
As I’ve mentioned before I used to live in the cinema houses but these days I watch more TV than I go to the movies. However never did I at any time like the popular “soaps” and I would just get the occasional glance at the likes of Dallas and Dynasty when they were switched on by others and I was part of a ‘captive audience’ in my home.
My impression of Hagman’s JR was that he was a boring guy in a to me ridiculous hat; and I could never understand how others could be attracted to such an unpleasant character ***over many episodes – though I was always mindful of my Bible “Give us Barabbas! – now Barabbas was a robber!”
It didn’t help that Larry -unlike the Brit Larry – seemed to me a very wooden actor. True he was a cut above the muscle boys down the years such as Stallone/Johnson/Statham but then not many thespians would have been in THEIR bracket; and on the face of it Joel seemed to think that only Brando and The Duke might break into the exclusive company of Sly/The Rock/Jace. To be fair to him though Hirsch does agree with me that Sly too was limited as an actor though very energetic and enterprising.
Anyway Joel and I are entitled to our opinions as “One man’s meat is another man’s poison.” PS: I liked Larry’s mother Mary Martin in the few movies of hers that I saw.
***“a covetous, egocentric, manipulative and amoral oil baron with psychopathic tendencies who is constantly plotting subterfuges to plunder his foes’ wealth.” -Wikipedia [are we still allowed to quote Wiki on this site?]
Hi Mr. Cogerson,
Another great page.
Thank you Mike…I was surprised she only had a dozen movies….and they were all in the database.