Background
Jean Dona Barley was born December 3, 1912 in Los Angeles to a single mother, Ethel Macgillivoy Barley, and raised by her grandparents.
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Dona Hardy
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Career
In the early 1930s she toured the United States with a dance troupe, but left and returned to her native Los Angeles during the Depression. She briefly dated an up-and-coming, but still largely unknown, actor named Anthony Quinn. She was the Executive Director of a United Way affiliate, and retired at age 66, when she looked to begin her acting career.
Hardy began her acting career late in life, usually playing sweet, sometimes deceptively harmless-looking old ladies.
During her acting career, Hardy bedded John Ritter, kissed Matthew Perry, and, fitted with a walker, was asked by faux-auteur Jerry Stiller (in an episode of The King of Queens) to consider "some tasteful nudity" for a community theater production of The Gin Game. She worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Dawson in her first film cr, the Stephen King-penned thriller, The Running Manitoba, in which she had played "Mistress
McArdle" and had to say a certain 12 letter hyphenated vulgarism. "There is nothing that people enjoy so much as hearing old people say dirty words.
I don"t know what"s so attractive about that, but every old lady knows she is going to be asked to say the "F" word sooner or later." Her second film cr, When Harry Met Sally, was her favorite film.
Her last role was in 2010.
