Today's Out Spotlight was an American character actress best known as Miss Jane Hathaway on the popular CBS television series The Beverly Hillbillies. Today's Out Spotlight is Nancy Kulp.
Nancy Jean Kulp was born August 28, 1921 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, the only child of Robert I. Kulp, a traveling salesman, and his wife, Marjorie S. Kulp. The family moved from Mifflintown, Pennsylvania, to Dade County, Florida, sometime before 1935.
Kulp received a bachelor's degree in journalism from the Florida State University in 1943, then known as the Florida State College for Women, and she started pursuing a master's degree in English and French at the University of Miami. She was a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority. Early in the 1940s she worked as a feature writer for the Miami Beach Tropics newspaper, writing profiles of celebrities, including Clark Gable and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
In 1944 she left the University of Miami to volunteer for service in the US Naval Reserve during World War II. As a member of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), Lt. Kulp received several decorations, including the American Campaign Medal, the National Defense Medal, and the Good Conduct Medal. She left the service in 1946.
She married Charles Malcolm Dacus on April 1, 1951, in Dade County, Florida; they divorced in 1961.
Late in life Kulp indicated to author Boze Hadley in a 1989 interview that she was a lesbian. "As long as you reproduce my reply word for word, and the question, you may use it.... I'd appreciate it if you'd let me phrase the question. There is more than one way. Here's how I would ask it: 'Do you think that opposites attract?' My own reply would be that I'm the other sort – I find that birds of a feather flock together. That answers your question."
Around the beginning of her marriage, she moved to Hollywood, California, to work in a studio publicity department, where director George Cukor convinced her that she should work in front of a camera.
She made her film debut as a character actress in 1951 in The Model and the Marriage Broker. She then appeared in other films, including Shane, Sabrina, and A Star is Born. Kulp has an uncredited bit part in a crowd scene as a fan of Donald O'Connor in one of the opening scenes in Anything Goes. After working in television on The Bob Cummings Show, she returned to movies in Forever, Darling, The Three Faces of Eve, The Parent Trap, and The Aristocats.
She was once described as television's most homely girl or, as one reviewer put it, possessing the "face of a shriveled balloon, the figure of a string of spaghetti, and the voice of a bullfrog in mating season." Others described her as tall and prim and praised her comedic skills.
In 1955 Kulp joined the cast of The Bob Cummings Show (a.k.a. Love That Bob) with Bob Cummings, portraying pith-helmeted neighborhood bird-watcher Pamela Livingstone.
In 1956 she appeared in the episode "Johnny Bravo" of Clint Walker's ABC\Warner Brothers series Cheyenne, with Clint Walker. Kulp appeared in 1955-1956 as Anastasia in three episodes of the NBC sitcom It's a Great Life. In 1960, she appeared as Emma St. John in the episode "Kill with Kindness" of the ABC-WB detective series, Bourbon Street Beat, starring Andrew Duggan.
Kulp appeared in one episode of I Love Lucy. In the 1957 episode "Lucy meets the Queen," Kulp portrayed an English maid, showing Lucy and Ethel how to properly curtsy before the Queen. She also appeared in episodes of The Real McCoys, Perry Mason (The Case of the Prodigal Parent, 1958), The Jack Benny Program, 87th Precinct, Pete and Gladys, The Twilight Zone, and The Outlaws, and she briefly played a drunken waitress with slightly slurred speech in a 1959 episode of Maverick, featuring James Garner, entitled "Full House." Kulp played a housekeeper in a pilot for The William Bendix Show, which aired as the 1960-61 season finale of CBS's Mister Ed under the episode title "Pine Lake Lodge."
In 1962 she landed her breakout role of Jane Hathaway, the love-starved bird-watching perennial spinster, on CBS's The Beverly Hillbillies television series. She remained with the show until its cancellation in 1971. In 1967, she received an Emmy Award nomination for her role.
In 1966, she appeared as Wilhemina Peterson in the film The Night of the Grizzly, starring Clint Walker and Martha Hyer.
After The Beverly Hillbillies Kulp appeared on The Brian Keith Show and Sanford and Son. She also appeared in Broadway productions, including Morning's at Seven in 1981.
In 1984, after working with the Democratic State Committee in her home state of Pennsylvania "on a variety of projects" over a period of years, Kulp ran for the United States House of Representatives as a Democrat from Pennsylvania, but she lost. As an opponent of a Republican incumbent, Bud Shuster, in a Republican district and in a year in which President Ronald Reagan won a reelection by a landslide, Kulp was the underdog despite the otherwise favorable climate for liberal Democrats in Pennsylvania as a whole. To her dismay Hillbillies co-star Buddy Ebsen supported Shuster and even appeared in a radio commercial in which he called Kulp "too liberal". Ebsen claimed that Kulp exploited her celebrity status, and that she did not have a grasp of the issues. Shuster defeated Kulp with 67 percent of the vote.
After her political defeat Kulp worked for Juniata College in Pennsylvania as an artist in residence. Later she taught acting and retired to a farm in Connecticut and later to Palm Desert, California.
Kulp was diagnosed with cancer in 1990, and she underwent chemotherapy. By 1991 the cancer had spread, and Kulp died on February 3 at a friend's home in Palm Desert, California. She returned home and was buried in the Westminster Presbyterian Cemetery in Mifflintown, Pennsylvania.
