- Betty McGuire passed away on October 8 at the age of 100.
- Her close friend confirmed her passing to The Hollywood Reporter, though word did not circulate until 10 days later.
- In a career spanning over seven decades, McGuire became a Broadway and television star, and is remembered for playing Kate Malone on ‘Growing Pains.’
Betty McGuire, the actress who spent six seasons of Growing Pains dropping in on the Seavers as Maggie’s mother, has died at 100. She died of natural causes on Thursday, October 8, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, where she had lived since 2017. Her close friend Keith Gerchak, an actor and co-founder of Double G Films, confirmed the news to The Hollywood Reporter, and word did not reach the public until 10 days later.
Her career ran about 70 years, from original Broadway casts with Ethel Merman to guest spots on ER, and she never seemed to stop looking for the next thing to try. “I’m a happy camper,” she said of her life at the retirement home in a 2019 NBC Nightly News segment. Her passing comes almost 10 years after the show lost its TV dad, Alan Thicke, so it feels right to check in on the rest of the Seaver family she visited all those years. We’ll get to them at the end.
Who Was Kate Malone to the Seavers?
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On Growing Pains, Kate Malone was the mother of Joanna Kerns’ Maggie Seaver, which made her grandmother to Mike, Carol, Ben and eventually little Chrissy. McGuire was never a series regular. According to The Hollywood Reporter, she played Kate in 12 episodes between 1986 and 1991 and turned up in all but one of the sitcom’s seven seasons. Variety places her in the first two seasons and again from Season 4 through Season 7.
Kate rarely came alone. Her TV husband, Ed Malone, was played by Gordon Jump, the same Gordon Jump viewers knew as the flustered station manager Mr. Carlson on WKRP in Cincinnati, and he died in 2003. Together, the Malones gave Maggie, a working mother with a houseful of kids, parents of her own to answer to.
McGuire was 60 when she first stepped into that Long Island living room. By then she had already lived a whole show business life that most of her TV grandchildren could hardly have imagined.
Before Hollywood, She Shared a Stage With Ethel Merman
Born March 20, 1926, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, McGuire made her Broadway debut in the original 1955 production of Plain and Fancy, the musical about two New Yorkers who wander into Pennsylvania Amish country. She followed it with Happy Hunting in 1956, a show built around Ethel Merman, and then Oh, Captain! in 1958 opposite Tony Randall. Over those three shows she performed and understudied alongside Merman and Bea Arthur, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
After Broadway she headlined as Mame at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, and her touring years took her as far as Australia in shows like Gypsy and Oliver!.
Television found her later than most. Her screen debut came in a 1973 episode of The Doris Day Show, as Deadline reported, and over the next three decades she worked her way through Columbo, Charlie’s Angels, Hill Street Blues and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Moviegoers may remember her best as Sister Mary Quacker in Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke. That came in 1978, the same year she played a nurse in Michael Crichton’s hospital thriller Coma.
What Did She Do at 92? She Started a Talk Show
Most people slow down when they move into a retirement home. McGuire went into television production. After settling at the Motion Picture & Television Fund campus in 2017, she hosted and produced GabFest on Channel 22, the home’s own in-house station. She was surrounded by Hollywood veterans she could have booked as guests, but she turned the camera on the staff instead and asked the people who cared for the residents about their own dreams and life stories.
She had a cause outside the studio, too. For years McGuire volunteered as a receptionist and advocate at the Coalition for Economic Survival, a Los Angeles legal clinic that helps low-income tenants who are facing eviction.
When NBC Nightly News came to profile the home in 2019, she summed up her outlook in a single question. “To have the chance to do new things and different things at 92, can you think of anything better?” she asked. “I can’t.”
She left no survivors, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Her TV family is another story.
Where the Seaver Family Is Now
The man at the head of the Seaver table is gone. Alan Thicke, who played psychiatrist Jason Seaver, died on December 13, 2016, at 69, after he collapsed while playing ice hockey with his son Carter in Burbank, California. The cause was an aortic dissection. Jeremy Miller, who played Ben, still talks about him like family. “He was my other dad,” Miller said in an August 2025 Youngstown Studio interview, as Fox News reported. When Miller was on the brink of homelessness, he said, “Alan and Kirk were the only two who stepped up to help me.”
Joanna Kerns, who played Kate’s TV daughter Maggie, is 73 and now works behind the camera, with recent episodes of Chicago Med and Happy’s Place among her directing credits. Kirk Cameron, our Mike Seaver, turned 56 on October 12. He has been married since 1991 to his former Growing Pains co-star Chelsea Noble, and the couple raised six children, four of them adopted. These days he hosts the faith-based talk show Takeaways with Kirk Cameron on TBN.
Tracey Gold, now 57, has been married to Roby Marshall since 1994, and they raised four sons together. The actress who played Carol has spoken openly for years about the anorexia she fought during the show’s run, and last year she showed off her natural grey hair at 56. Ashley Johnson joined the cast as baby sister Chrissy at age six. She is 43 now and won a BAFTA award for voicing Ellie in the video game The Last of Us. She has also opened up about a frightening attempted abduction on set when she was a child.
Then there was Luke Brower, the homeless teenager the Seavers took in during the show’s final season. Leonardo DiCaprio played him in 1991 and 1992, and the actor, now 51, most recently starred in Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another.
That leaves Ben. Jeremy Miller, the youngest Seaver boy, turns 50 today, and in the reruns Grandma Kate is still ringing the doorbell of the house where he grew up on camera. It is a good way to keep her: a woman of 60 in a sitcom living room, with Ethel Merman behind her and a talk show of her own still ahead.
