Obituary: Donna Douglas from ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’

Actress famous for playing Elly May Clampett, a buxom tomboy with tight jeans, in ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’

Donna Douglas, the actress, who has died aged 82, was best known for playing Elly May Clampett, the buxom backwoods tomboy in spray-on jeans, in the 1960s American sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies.

In Donna Douglas’s subsequent career, critics always measured her performances against the role, for which she won two Golden Globes. Yet she never minded being typecast, partly because her own life had been very similar to that of her television character. “Elly May was like a slice out of my life,” she said.

She was born Doris Smith on September 26, 1933, in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where her family had lived for more than three generations. Her father worked at a local oil refinery while her mother was a former telephone operator. She participated in the local Roman Catholic high school where she excelled at sport.

Aged 16, she married Roland Bourgeois, a car parts salesman – although, as she later recalled, “all we had in common really was playing baseball and basketball”. They were divorced soon after the birth of a son in 1954.

Three years later she won a ‘Miss New Orleans’ beauty contest, which she had entered under the name Donna Douglas. Encouraged by this success she moved to New York, where her blonde good won looks her immediate work in a toothpaste commercial. By the early 1960s she was appearing in nationally-broadcast variety spectaculars and taking small parts in series such as Whirlybirds, Dr Kildare and Route 66. She also had a part in Career, a film starring Dean Martin and Shirley MacLaine, and in 1966 was the female lead in the Elvis Presley vehicle, Frankie and Johnny.

By then, Donna Douglas had become famous as Elly May Clampett, a role she won after an audition in which she had to milk a goat. She starred in the CBS series from its inception in 1962 to the final episode in 1971, when she married the show’s director Robert Leeds.
The series, about a backwoods family who became oil millionaires and “loaded up the truck and moved to Beverly” (Hills), became a national and international success. “Even to this day, it’s shown every day somewhere,” Douglas observed in 2003.

She became the subject of Elly May merchandising spin-offs ranging from dolls to coloring books and in 1981 she participated in the television film Return of the Beverly Hillbillies, while in The Legend of the Beverly Hillbillies (1993) she took a cameo role as a zookeeper.

During the intervening years, Douglas moved back to Louisiana, where she launched a new career as a singer and made several recordings, beginning with Donna Douglas Sings Gospel (1982). She published a book, Donna’s Critters & Kids: Children’s Stories with a Bible Touch and, with Javetta Saunders, a cookbook, Southern Favorites with a Taste of Hollywood (2013).

Donna Douglas is survived by her son.