Long before she ever set foot in a TV kitchen, Hazel Burke had been running other people’s households in print. Cartoonist Ted Key created the bossy, big-hearted maid for The Saturday Evening Post in 1943, and when Screen Gems brought her to NBC on September 28, 1961, the apron went to Shirley Booth, a Broadway star who already had an Academy Award. Her Hazel called her employer “Mr. B” and knew everyone’s business on the block. She was usually right, too, which drove the Baxters a little crazy and kept viewers tuning in for five seasons.
The Hazel cast actually changed homes midway through. After four seasons on NBC, the show moved to CBS in 1965, and the new network wanted a younger family, so the original Baxters were written off to a job overseas while Hazel and young Harold moved in with George’s brother Steve, his wife Barbara and their little girl Susie. All told, the series ran 154 episodes. Sixty years after the last one aired, here is what became of the people who shared that house, and the one familiar face we can confirm is still with us today.
Is Don DeFore still alive?
Don DeFore played George Baxter, the lawyer whose name Hazel shortened to “Mr. B,” for the show’s four NBC seasons. He arrived with plenty of television behind him, having spent the 1950s as Thorny, the Nelsons’ next-door neighbor on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. He was also a businessman. Starting in 1957, he and his family ran the Silver Banjo Barbecue in Disneyland’s Frontierland, a restaurant the Disney history site Yesterland still remembers fondly.
DeFore also served a term as president of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in the mid-1950s, and he kept working in guest roles on shows like Mannix long after Hazel. He died of cardiac arrest on December 22, 1993, at St. John’s Hospital and Health Center in Santa Monica, California, at age 80. The Associated Press obituary, as carried by the Seattle Times, called him “Ozzie Nelson’s TV neighbor,” and the Los Angeles Times headline remembered him as the man who “Played Mr. B on ‘Hazel.'” His on-screen wife had a second act that was even more surprising.
Is Whitney Blake still alive?
Whitney Blake played Dorothy Baxter, who shared the house, and Hazel, with George. Blake saw the show as pure comfort. “We don’t deal with deep problems,” she once told the Los Angeles Times, adding that the goal was to “make people happy,” in remarks Parade resurfaced this year.
When the show moved to CBS, she and DeFore were let go, and her biggest contribution to television came later. With her husband, writer Allan Manings, Blake co-created the CBS sitcom One Day at a Time, which ran nine seasons and made stars of Bonnie Franklin and Valerie Bertinelli. Her daughter from her first marriage is Meredith Baxter of Family Ties, and mother and daughter acted together in a 1978 episode of Family. Blake learned she had esophageal cancer on her 76th birthday and died seven months later, on September 28, 2002, at her home in Edgartown, Massachusetts. She was 76. The young actor who played her son had been gone for nearly three decades by then.
Is Bobby Buntrock still alive?
Bobby Buntrock was the only child actor to stay for all five seasons, playing Harold, the Baxters’ son, whom Hazel affectionately called “Sport.” He kept busy off the set as well. Parade notes that he filmed a 1963 Ford Falcon commercial with Whitney Blake, and his father told a reporter in 1961 that his son “likes to play the accordion and likes baseball, too.”
After Hazel ended, Buntrock made a few appearances on The Virginian and then left acting. His family moved to South Dakota, where he finished high school in 1970. On April 7, 1974, his car went off a bridge under construction near Keystone, South Dakota, and plunged into Battle Creek. He drowned at just 21. The Rapid City Journal death notice said he had been a member of the National Guard in Rapid City, according to Parade. Hazel’s best friend on the block also left us far too soon.
Is Maudie Prickett still alive?
Every maid needs a confidante, and Hazel’s was Rosie, the maid next door, played by Maudie Prickett in 36 episodes across all five seasons. Prickett was one of those faces you knew without always knowing the name. She played the maid Elsie in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, popped up on The Andy Griffith Show and Bewitched, and turned up regularly on The Jack Benny Program as the secretary of Jack’s fan club.
By most counts she worked in more than 300 stage, film and television productions over nearly four decades. Prickett died on April 14, 1976, in Pasadena, California, at age 61. Her death was attributed to uremic poisoning. The actor who took over as the man of the house in the final season had a very different background, on the Broadway stage.
Is Ray Fulmer still alive?
Ray Fulmer joined Hazel for its CBS season as Steve Baxter, George’s younger brother, who inherited both Hazel and his nephew Harold. The Philadelphia native had served in the Army in Germany in the 1950s before studying acting in New York, and in 1957 he joined the Broadway cast of Auntie Mame as the grown-up Patrick Dennis.
After Hazel, Fulmer found steady work in daytime television, playing Lee Gantry on Guiding Light and a role on Somerset. He retired in 1992 after an appearance on The New WKRP in Cincinnati. Fulmer died in Newport Beach, California, in 2013, at age 79. Wikipedia and Find a Grave date his death to February 6, though IMDb lists a different day that year. His TV wife came to Hollywood by way of a pageant runway.
Is Lynn Borden still alive?
Lynn Borden played Barbara Baxter, Steve’s wife and Susie’s mother, in that final season. Born Lynn Marie Freyse in Detroit and raised in Tucson, she won the Miss Arizona title in 1957 and competed at Miss America before turning to acting. Her father, Bill Freyse, was a newspaper cartoonist, which gave her a nice connection to a show that started as a magazine cartoon.
Borden worked steadily for decades after Hazel. She appeared in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Walking Tall and the 1972 eco-horror film Frogs, and she guest-starred on The Fugitive, Get Smart and Fantasy Island before retiring in 2006. She died on March 3, 2015, in Encino, California, after a long illness, three weeks short of her 78th birthday. She was 77, and her husband of more than 30 years, Roger Brunelle, survived her. That leaves the woman at the center of it all.
Is Shirley Booth still alive?
When Shirley Booth signed on to play a maid, she was one of the most decorated actresses in the business. Born Marjory Ford in Brooklyn, she had won three Tony Awards, and her Oscar for Come Back, Little Sheba made her the first actress to win both a Tony and an Oscar for the same role. Hazel added two Emmys, in 1962 and 1963, which put her among the few performers with the so-called Triple Crown of acting.
She took the part seriously. “My job was to give her heart,” she told the Associated Press in 1963, and she never tired of it. “Hazel never bores me,” she said. “Besides, she’s my insurance policy.” After the show, she earned another Emmy nomination for a 1966 production of The Glass Menagerie, tried a short-lived sitcom called A Touch of Grace in 1973, and gave her final performance as the voice of Mrs. Claus in The Year Without a Santa Claus in 1974.
Then she retired to Cape Cod and kept to herself. “I’m devoted to privacy,” she said in 1971. Booth died of natural causes at her home in North Chatham, Massachusetts, on October 16, 1992. For years her studio biographies had made her younger, and the Seattle Times reported at the time that reference books put her at 85 while her sister, Jean Coe, said she was 94. The 1898 birth date that came out after her death bears out her sister. One of the youngest faces from her final season, though, is still telling stories today.
Is Ann Jillian still alive?
Yes. Ann Jillian, born Ann Jura Nauseda in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 29, 1950, is 76 years old. She was only 15 when she joined Hazel in its CBS season as Millie Ballard, a recurring role she played in 11 episodes. She had already been acting since childhood, and she told Fox News in 2021 that she never minded it. “I was never forced,” she said. “I did it because I loved it.”
Her real fame came in the 1980s. As Cassie Cranston on It’s a Living, she became a sex symbol on a sitcom that found its biggest audience in syndication, and her turn as Mae West in a 1982 TV movie earned Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. In 1985, at 35, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. She played herself in The Ann Jillian Story in 1988 and won a Golden Globe for it. You can read more about how the former child star became an ’80s sex symbol in our earlier story.
Jillian married Chicago police sergeant Andy Murcia in 1978, and their only child, Andrew, arrived in 1992, when she was 42. That is when she stepped away. “I gave birth to my one and only son when I was 42, and I took that seriously too,” she said on the podcast Famous with Jacy Dawn Valeras, as Fox News reported in April 2026. “So, basically, I hung up my dancing shoes, so to speak.” Her son grew up to be an international tax attorney, and she has no regrets about the trade. “I love my industry,” she said. “I loved the job that I had and was thankful for it. I find it remarkable when I look at it now.”
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