JUNE LOCKHART
(25 June 1925 – 23 October 2025)
June Lockhart, who has died at the age of 100, was always a popular performer, if never reaching the heights of great stardom. She began her film career as a child actress in 1938, appearing in family movies such as Adam Had Four Sons, Miss Annie Rooney (with Shirley Temple), Meet Me in St Louis (as Lucille Ballard) and Son of Lassie. Later, she ventured into television where she appeared in many favourite series including Lassie from 1958 to 1964, in the part of Ruth Martin (for some 200 episodes). She returned to films in the 1980s as well as still appearing on TV, notching up nearly 200 individual titles. She then became associated with Lost in Space from 1965 to 1993, making over eighty episodes of the popular science fiction series, the feature film and the later revival by Netflix.
June Kathleen Lockhart was born in New York City to the Canadian-American actor Gene Lockhart and his wife, the English-born actress Kathleen Lockhart. June went to the Westlake School for Girls in Beverly Hills, California and made her stage debut at eight playing Mimsey in Peter Ibbetson, the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Deems Taylor’s opera. Her film debut was with her parents in the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol. They played Bob and Mrs Cratchit to Reginald Owen’s Scrooge, and June was their uncredited daughter Belinda. During the 1940s she went on to play supporting roles in Sergeant York with Gary Cooper, All This and Heaven Too with Bette Davis and Charles Boyer, and The Yearling with Gregory Peck and Jane Wyman. In 1945 she played Priscilla in Son of Lassie, a sequel to Lassie Come Home. Whether this had any bearing on her later playing Ruth Martin in the TV series or not, it served her well for her future career. Lockhart appeared in all kinds of genre pictures such as She-Wolf of London (horror), Bury Me Dead (comedy noir), T-Men (police procedural) directed by Anthony Mann, and the legal drama Time Limit, directed by Karl Malden.
Her later films included Michael Laughlin’s 1983 sci-fi Strange Invaders with Paul Le Mat and Nancy Allen, the fantasy comedy Troll with Michael Moriarty (the first episode of the series), Rented Lips, a satirical comedy directed by Robert Downey Sr and starring Robert Downey Jr and Jennifer Tilly, Christopher Guest’s first film The Big Picture with Kevin Bacon, and the 1998 feature of Lost in Space, playing Principal Cartwright. Her last appearance was, aptly enough, as June, the Voice of Alpha Control in the Lost in Space Netflix revival in 2021.
June Lockhart married the ex-Navy physician John F. Maloney in 1951 and they had two daughters, Anne and June, and divorced in 1959. Then she married the architect John Lindsay (1959-1970). For some reason she was fascinated by US Presidential candidates and would travel with them, beginning with Eisenhower and Stevenson in 1956, and until 2004 she attended many more presidential hearings.
MICHAEL DARVELL