Ellen Weston, the actress, writer and producer who appeared on Broadway, Get Smart, S.W.A.T. and soap operas and penned songs for a pair of Lesley Gore comeback albums, has died. She was 87.
Weston died May 28 at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, her friend, producer and manager Susan Zachary, told The Hollywood Reporter.
The New York native portrayed Robin Fletcher on CBS’ The Guiding Light in 1963-64, Carol Pearson and Karen Gregory on NBC’s Another World in 1964-65 and Suzanne Thurston on CBS’ The Young and the Restless in 1978-80.
She wrote for the CBS soap Capitol in 1986, then was hired by Guiding Light executive producer John Conboy in 2003 to serve as co-head writer on that daytime drama. “I like to think of every day as a mini-movie,” she said in an interview with Soap Opera Digest.
Weston shared a WGA Award for her work and remained on the job for about two years before she was replaced by David Kreizman.
A daughter of educators, Ellen Rachel Weinstein was born in New York on April 19, 1939. She said that when she was a kid, she used to dream that she was a twin.
“One was always the adorable, well-loved star. The other was the poor soul, the nebbish,” she explained in a 1968 interview. “Show business always seemed so untouchable, like Cinderella. But I also always felt instinctively that there was something destructive about it and sensed some imminent danger in wanting it so badly.”
She attended the Performing Arts High School, Hofstra University, NYU and Hunter College and in 1960 made it to Broadway as an understudy in the drama Toys in the Attic, starring Jason Robards Jr. and Maureen Stapleton and directed by Arthur Penn.
The next year, the doe-eyed Weston was the sister of Sigmund Freud (portrayed by Steven Hill) in A Far Country and in 1962 replaced Betsy von Furstenberg in the cast of the long-running Jean Kerr comedy Mary, Mary, starring Barbara Bel Geddes.
Weston showed up as Dr. Steele, a sexy CONTROL chemist who doubles as a showgirl, on the third season (1967-68) of NBC’s Get Smart and recurred as Betty Harrelson, the wife of Steve Forrest’s Lt. “Hondo” Harrelson, on the first season of ABC’s S.W.A.T. in 1975.
Her TV résumé also included stops on Run for Your Life, N.Y.P.D., Bonanza, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Mannix, Bewitched (as the Countess Piranha), Hawkins, Harry O, Barnaby Jones, The Bob Newhart Show, Cannon, Baretta and Wonder Woman.
As a lyricist, Weston wrote seven songs with Gore on the “It’s My Party” singer’s 1972 album, Someplace Else Now — her first LP in five years — and all the tunes for her follow-up 1975 album, Love Me by Name, produced by Quincy Jones.
“Together they would write a stellar 60 original songs,” Trevor Tolliver wrote in his 2015 book, You Don’t Own Me: The Life and Times of Lesley Gore. “The meshing of Lesley’s musical know-how with Ellen’s genius as a wordsmith was genius.”
Weston went to law school a bit later in life and worked at CBS in business affairs. Her first spec TV movie sold and got made, and her credits as a writer and/or producer in that realm included 1999’s And the Beat Goes On: The Sonny and Cher Story for ABC.
She was married to music engineer Ami Hadani (co-founder of the Los Angeles recording studio TTG) and composer Marvin Laird; both marriages ended in divorce. She is survived by her son, Jon Weston, a sound designer.
In a statement, friends called her “a rare person who had both right and left-brain proficiency … she was as skilled at a legal brief as she was with a knitting needle.
“She was our consigliere dispensing advice, wisdom, compassion and care in equal measure — especially when we most needed an ear, a shoulder and a true confidante. She was beyond a loyal friend — she was a fierce advocate for every single one of us.
“She took excellent care of herself, always tastefully put together with gorgeous outfits, the perfect makeup and more. Up until the very end, she was still dancing and taking new classes; the latest was a pottery class taught by a dear friend that ended a month before her passing.”
Original Article on Hollywood Reporter