Elizabeth MacRae, who played girlfriends of Gomer Pyle and Festus Haggen on television and a woman who seduces Gene Hackman‘s surveillance expert in The Conversation, has died. She was 88.
MacRae died Monday in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where she was raised, her family announced.
MacRae showed up as Lou-Ann Poovie on 15 episodes of the CBS comedy Gomer Pyle: USMC during its final three seasons (1966-69). She was signed to work just one episode, “Love’s Old Sweet Song,” on the Jim Nabors starrer but impressed producers enough to stick around for more.
Earlier, she portrayed April Clomley, the girlfriend of deputy marshal Festus (Ken Curtis), on CBS’ Gunsmoke on four installments from 1962-64.
In The Conversation (1974), written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, MacRae played Meredith, who dances with Hackman’s Harry Caul in his apartment, sleeps with him and then swipes one of his audiotapes. The actress was among the cast and crew who went to Cannes when the film screened at the festival.
Elizabeth Herndon MacRae was born on Feb. 22, 1936, in Columbia, South Carolina, and grew up in Fayetteville. Her father, James, was an attorney who later became a Cumberland County Superior Court judge.
After graduating from the college-prep school Holton-Arms in Washington, MacRae traveled to Atlanta to audition for the role of Joan of Arc in Saint Joan (1957). She didn’t get the part (Jean Seberg did), but director Otto Preminger told her she had “intuitive talent” and encouraged her to improve.
In New York, she studied acting with Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio and drawing and painting at the Art Students League. “Daddy gave me $100 and told me to come home when it was gone,” she once said. “But I got a job modeling within a week and started studying drama and speech to lose my Southern accent.”
MacRae was hired for episodes of such shows as The Verdict Is Yours, Rendezvous, Naked City, Route 66, Maverick and The Asphalt Jungle before appearing in her first two movies, Everything’s Ducky and Love in a Goldfish Bowl, in 1961.
She then appeared in the Kirk Douglas film For Love or Money (1963), starred as a striptease artist in Wild Is My Love (1963) and was the voice of Ladyfish, the animated love interest of Don Knotts‘ character, in The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964).
MacRae arrived on Gomer Pyle as Loo-Ann, an inept lounge singer from North Carolina.