Gloria Henry, the actress who played Dennis the Menace‘s mom has died at the age of 98. Alice Mitchell tried to keep track of the little trouble-maker on the 1960’s CBS comedy that many remember fondly. Henry actually made her name in some “B” pictures before settling into the sitcom life opposite Herbert Anderson. The Hollywood Reporter confirmed the details after receiving a statement from her daughter Erin this weekend. Dennis the Menace ran for four seasons back in 1959 and has imprinted on tons of people due to reruns. Dennis himself proved to be a bit of an archetype for generations of television’s mischievous boys. (If you love Gene Autry’s singing cowboy adventures, 1949’s Riders in the Sky is kind of a hoot.) ShoutFactory licensed Dennis’ adventures in 2011 and Henry gave an interview to New Jersey.com.
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“Many of the fans say, ‘Oh, I always wished you were my mom’ and ‘My mom was jealous of you, because I wanted you for a mom.’ Which is pretty funny, because I don’t think my own children felt that way. I have a daughter and two sons. All they knew was, I was off to work, and I wasn’t with them as much as they would have liked me to be.”
She also talked about how the adjustment to the fast pace of television was pretty easy for her. The work just never stopped for the actress.
“I did a lot of B pictures, and those went pretty fast,” Henry joked. “So it was not a hard adjustment to make, because I was used to shooting fast anyway. In those days, television was a one-camera thing. You had one day of reading over the script in the morning, and then the afternoon was sort of spotting where you would be standing, where the camera would be, for most of it. Then you shot for three days straight. If there was anything left over to do, they would combine that on Friday with any commercials. We were doing commercials for Kellogg’s at that time.”
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