Betty Harford, Actress on ‘Dynasty’ and ‘The Paper Chase,’ Dies at 98

Betty Harford, who played Mrs. Nottingham, John Houseman’s secretary, on The Paper Chase and Mrs. Gunnerson, the Carrington family cook, on Dynasty, has died. She was 98.

Harford died Nov. 2 in Santa Barbara, her friend Wendy Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter.

On the big screen, Harford cared for Sandra Dee’s Rosalie Stocker in The Wild and the Innocent (1959) and portrayed the opportunistic older sister of Natalie Wood’s unstable title character in Inside Daisy Clover (1965), the melodrama directed by Robert Mulligan.

Harford had acted in Houseman’s UCLA Theatre Group in the 1960s and played a nurse for director James Bridges in the Richard Thomas-starring 1977 film September 30, 1955 — that’s the day James Dean died in a car crash — when she was cast as the secretary for law school professor Charles W. Kingsfield (Houseman) on the CBS drama The Paper Chase.

She showed up as the prickly but efficient Mrs. Nottingham on 41 episodes of the series, which ran for one season (1978-79) on CBS and three more (1983-86) on Showtime. (The show, developed by Bridges, was based on a 1971 novel by John Jay Osborn Jr. and the Bridges-helmed 1973 Fox film that won Houseman an Academy Award.)

Meanwhile, Harford had started another subservient role in 1981 on ABC’s Dynasty, and she would recur as Hilda Gunnerson — working for John Forsythe’s Blake Carrington — on 34 episodes of the primetime soap during its first eight seasons (1981-87). She then came back for the 1991 reunion miniseries.

Born in New York City on Jan. 28, 1927, Harford acted in the 1950s on the radio on Gunsmoke and the docudrama series Crime Classics, appeared on the TV anthology shows Fireside Theatre, Luv Video Theatre and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and provided the voice of Gumba (mother of Gumby, wife of Gumbo) on a cartoon.

Later, she was on the TV version of Gunsmoke as well as on Richard Diamond, Private Detective, The Twilight Zone (on the 1962 Richard Long-starring “Person or Persons Unknown” episode) and a 1963 installment of The Great Adventure that was written by Bridges.

As a member of the Westwood-based UCLA Theatre Group — launched in 1959 by Houseman, Eva Marie Saint, Paul Newman, Robert Ryan and others — Harford acted alongside the likes of Nina Foch, Inga Swenson and Pippa Scott.

Her résumé also included roles on TV’s Dr. Kildare, The Big Valley, Room 222 and Mrs. Columbo and bit parts in such films as Spartacus (1960), Signpost to Murder (1964), Win, Place or Steal (1974) and the Bridges-directed The China Syndrome (1979).

She was married to sculptor Oliver Andrews (he died at age 53 while scuba diving off the coast of California in 1978) and to Hungarian actor Sándor Naszódy (he died at age 81 in 1996).

Survivors include her son, Chris, and her grandsons.