Lockhart inherited the first role from an unhappy Cloris Leachman at the start of Lassie’s fifth season, landing an Emmy nomination at the end of her first year. But it was as Lost in Space transitioned from black-and-white into colour at the end of its first season that Lockhart’s star soared: blue-eyed and redheaded, she radiated maternal warmth amid the vast cosmic void.
In 1967, she was voted Favourite Female Star in the annual Photoplay Awards; for years afterwards, she would be approached by fans who told her the late Sixties’ other notable Mrs. Robinson had inspired them to become scientists. As she once quipped: “I did Lassie for six years and I never had anybody come up to me and say ‘it made me want to be a farmer’.”
June Kathleen Lockhart was born in New York on June 25, 1925 to actors Gene and Kathleen Lockhart (née Arthur). She made her debut aged eight in a Met Opera production of Peter Ibbotson; after the family relocated to Hollywood, the young June attended Westlake School for Girls, making an uncredited film debut – alongside her folks – as Belinda Cratchit in MGM’s A Christmas Carol (1938).
Prominent studio work followed as the hero’s sister in Sergeant York (1941) and society belle Lucille Ballard in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). Anticipating things to come, she inherited Elizabeth Taylor’s Lassie Come Home role for the sequel Son of Lassie (1945); there was a very different brush with the furry side of life as the heroine of the Universal horror She-Wolf of London (1946).
She soon caught the Broadway bug, winning a Tony with the 1947 premiere of F. Hugh Herbert’s For Love or Money; “Lockhart has burst on Broadway with the suddenness of an unpredicted comet,” wrote one awestruck observer. She would return to the stage in subsequent decades: in 1979, she was directed by Peter Hall in a West Coast staging of Alan Ayckbourn’s Bedroom Farce.
Lockhart bolstered her growing TV popularity with appearances in such popular Western series as Have Gun, Will Travel (in 1957-8), Rawhide (in 1959) and Wagon Train (between 1958 and 1960); she also served as a hostess on televised Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants, while advertising Campbell’s soup and – inevitably – Gravy Train dog food.
She cameoed as herself on the postmodern sitcom It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1987), advising the star on how to care for a stray collie, and described a 1995 guest spot on Roseanne as “the highlight of my career”. Later, she returned to familiar territory, playing a holographic schoolmarm in the big-screen Lost in Space (1998) before voicing the computer in Netflix’s 21st century revival of the show, her final credit.
Away from the cameras, she was a politics junkie from the moment she asked Harry Truman what life was like in the Oval Office (“He looked at me and said ‘it’s just like being in jail’”). She travelled with both Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson before the 1956 election, and regularly used her lifetime pass to White House press briefings, using her platform to speak out against the Vietnam War and champion progressive causes.
She remains among the few to have two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame – one for her film work, one for TV – but confessed entertainment wasn’t everything: “I’m not really affected whether or not the phone rings asking me to do a job. When you’re working, you’re very professional and you do the work. You know your lines and you hit your marks and your collar’s clean. [But] there is a wonderful world out there besides what you do on screen.”
She married twice in the 1950s, to John F. Maloney and the architect John Lindsay; both ended in divorce. She is survived by her two actress daughters with Maloney, Lizabeth and Anne.
June Lockhart, born June 25, 1925, died October 23, 2025.
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