June Lockhart has died. A veteran actress of screens both large and small, Lockhart’s career stretched from the golden age of Hollywood up through the modern era, with notable roles as two of the most famous TV moms in the entire history of the medium: Ruth Martin on Lassie, and Maureen Robinson on Lost In Space. Possessed of an apparently tireless energy—and a cheerful willingness to poke gentle fun at some of her most famous jobs—Lockhart continued to work, including as a prolific voice actor, well into the 21st century. Per Variety, Lockhart died on October 23, 2025, from natural causes. She was 100.
Born to well-known actors Gene and Kathleen Lockhart, Lockhart took to both stage and screen early. (All three Lockharts can be seen together in the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, with Gene and Kathleen as the Cratchit parents, and June as one of their daughters.) Early roles saw the younger Lockhart work with names as big as Howard Hawks (for Sergeant York), Judy Garland (Meet Me In St. Louis), and Lana Turner (Keep Your Powder Dry), although film roles began to become more sparse as she aged out of child acting. Lockhart had her first brush with the Lassie franchise when she was cast in 1945 sequel Son Of Lassie; more than a decade later, she’d take over the part of Ruth Martin (mother of Timmy) from Cloris Leachman in the TV version of the franchise, ultimately appearing in more than 200 episodes of the series.
And although she continued to appear in smaller gig during these same periods—scoring one or two-episode stints on basically all of the old anthology shows of the era, including Playhouse 90, Schlitz Playhouse, and many others—Lockhart also had a knack for lining up her next stable job. In 1965, she was cast in Irwin Allen’s sitcom space opera Lost In Space, serving as the biochemist mother to Billy Mumy’s Will Robinson. (Years later, Lockhart, a die-hard NASA nerd, would parlay her sci-fi name recognition into a long relationship as a spokesperson and booster for the real-life space agency.) From there, she went on to roles in the latter years of Petticoat Junction, and had a regular job in the ’80s and ’90s on long-running soap General Hospital.
That same period also saw Lockhart take on a sort of elder stateswoman status, often getting cast in shows created by people who’d grown up watching her as one of the planet’s preeminent TV moms. Often, she seemed drawn to TV’s oddballs: She appeared on comedies like It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, Get A Life, and The Drew Carey Show, often in winking meta-gags about her maternal status. She also began taking on work as a voice performer, just as often in decidedly strange places: In the 1990s, you could hear Lockhart’s cheerful, matronly voice pop up on shows like The Critic, Duckman, and Ren & Stimpy.
Although she expressed her gratitude for roles like Lassie and Lost In Space for the rest of her life—saying of Lassie, “How wonderful that in a career there is one role for which you are known. Many actors work all their lives and never have one part that is really theirs”—Lockhart also enjoyed making it clear that she had a far more varied set of interests than what she could be seen doing on TV. Married twice, Lockhart noted that her fascinations often ran to rock music and politics, stating once that, “I love rock ‘n’ roll and going to the concerts. I have driven Army tanks and flown in hot air balloons. And I go plane-gliding—the ones with no motors. I do a lot of things that don’t go with my image.”
It feels worth highlighting one branch of Lockhart’s boundless enthusiasm for the world beyond television maternalism: An avid follower of presidential politics, she traveled with multiple presidential campaigns on the campaign trail in the ’50s and ’60s (including both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon’s in 1960), and was gifted a lifetime pass to the White House press room in the 1950s—a privilege she made vigorous use of, attending press briefings with some regularity from 1957 to 2004. (Lockhart was only ever invited to ask one question during her many trips to the briefing room, inquiring the name of the vet working on George H.W. Bush’s dog Millie when she gave birth to puppies in 1989; the information was, apparently, classified.) A family spokesperson and long-time friend, Lyle Gregory, said in a press statement after her death this week that Lockhart’s “true passion was journalism.” In an interview in 2016, Lockhart noted that she continued to read three newspapers a day into her 90s, saying, “You absolutely must be aware of what is going on with the press and with the news.”
