Considering Granny’s age in The Beverly Hillbillies and the year Irene Ryan was born, many wonder, “How old was Irene Ryan when she played Granny?”
When someone stumbles across a photo of Irene Ryan from the 1960s and then sees her character on The Beverly Hillbillies, one question springs to mind: “How old was Irene Ryan when she played Granny?” As a main characters throughout the nine seasons of The Beverly Hillbillies, Daisy May Moses, better known as “Granny”, was a fixture of ’60s and ’70s television. Jed’s mother-in-law, Granny, is a shotgun-toting, mountain medicine-applying, short-tempered woman who has little patience for the easy, breezy lifestyles of Beverly Hills, California, and always makes sure to let everyone know she’s a country girl at heart.
While The Beverly Hillbillies may be one of those ’60s sitcoms that took forever and all the network television that came later, in the moment, it was extremely popular. Even with big names like Erika Eleniak as Ellie May and Buddy Ebsen as Jed, it’s hard to deny that Irene Ryan’s Granny was a key reason for the show’s success. Her bristly edges hide a soft inner core that makes her a delightful, zany character, capable of everything from singlehandedly tossing police officers out of her mansion to catch and cook up raccoons for dinner.
Who Is The Beverly Hillbillies’s Irene Ryan
Granny Is Played By A Vaudeville, Radio And Movie Veteran
Irene Ryan played Granny for the entire run of the series, and it’s the role she’s best known for, but she had a respectable career before and an acclaimed one after. Born Irene Noblette in El Paso in 1902 (via The New York Times), Irene met her husband, Tim Ryan, while working in vaudeville, and the Ryans went into radio when vaudeville began drying up. The pair spent most of their careers on radio, hosting “Tim and Irene”, a nationally listened-to podcast.
Later in her career, in the 1940s, Ryan found steady work in movies like Rockabilly Baby as Eunice Johnson, Diary of a Chambermaid as Louise, and Half Angel as Nurse Kay. She also found success on television, with small roles in The Real McCoys, Bringing Up Buddy, and My Three Sons. Irene was not desperate for work, but she still did not have that breakthrough role that would rocket her to stardom. That all changed with her audition for Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies.
It wasn’t easy to get that audition, however. There are a few rumors about how Ryan got the role in The Beverly Hillbillies, including that actress Bea Benaderet vouched for her on set. According to an interview with Ryan in the El Paso Times from 1963, the casting director for The Beverly Hillbillies told Ryan she was too young for the part. Undeterred, Irene called up the show’s creator, Paul Henning, and told him,
“Look, Paul, do I have to go home and get my gray wig and shawl to convince you? If you get anybody older to play the role, she wont be able to stand the pace. I know what those 7-to-7 schedules are like.”
However, Henning himself corroborates the Bea story. He tells Emmy TV Legends in an emblematic tale of Ryan,
“Irene Ryan had paid us a visit… and she came by the office. We had used her on The Dennis Day Show… and she came by, and I said ‘Irene, do you think you can play the part of a hillbilly?’
And she said, ‘Are you kidding?… I was at a stock company when we played a theater in Arkansas… We kept waiting for the curtain to go up backstage… and finally the curtain didn’t go up and there were nobody in the theater. So we went up and talked to the manager and [asked] why [he] didn’t let the people in. And he said that if he’d let them in before the curtain came up, they would whittle away the seats. So I know hillbilly.’
So when we had the screen tests and Bea Benaderet was there to try out for the role of Granny. And as soon as Irene Ryan read the part, Bea came over to me and she said, ‘There’s Granny’. She was just wonderful.”
Despite it seeming like all the stars had aligned for Ryan and The Beverly HIllbillies, Ryan never felt like her position on the show was secure. In an interview with Star Gazette in 1965, in the midst of The Beverly Hillbillies’ popularity, Ryan shared that in the back of her mind, she was still nervous about being fired from the show. She said (via MeTV),
“I’m the first one on the set for every scene. All my life, I’ve been on time. I was always scared I would be fired. And you know something. I’m still scared.”
Ryan had spent her whole life hustling for work. She traveled for vaudeville, pivoted to radio, and jumped to television and movies when they were made available to her. Even after her immense success on The Beverly Hillbillies, Ryan could not shake that trained instinct to constantly be prepared for when an entertainment job might be cut short.
