Betty McGuire, the actress who played Maggie Seaver’s mother on “Growing Pains,” died of natural causes Oct. 8, 2026, at 100.
She died at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, Calif., the retirement home for entertainment industry veterans where she had lived since 2017. Keith Gerchak, an actor, co-founder of Double G Films and a close family friend, confirmed her death on Sunday, Oct. 18.
12 Episodes With the Seavers
McGuire played Kate Malone, the mother of Joanna Kerns’ Maggie Seaver and grandmother to the Seaver children, in 12 episodes of the ABC sitcom from 1986-91. She turned up in all but one of the comedy’s seven seasons. Gordon Jump played her onscreen husband, Ed.
“Growing Pains” originally aired on ABC from 1985 to 1992 and centered on a Long Island family, with Kerns, Alan Thicke and Kirk Cameron in the lead roles. Leonardo DiCaprio joined the cast in the final season and appeared in more than 20 episodes.
From Ethel Merman to “Up in Smoke”
Born March 20, 1926, in Bridgeport, Conn., McGuire appeared three times on Broadway. She performed and understudied alongside Ethel Merman, Barbara Cook, Bea Arthur and Tony Randall in the original productions of the musicals “Plain and Fancy” in 1955-56, “Happy Hunting” in 1956-57 and “Oh, Captain!” in 1958.
She later headlined as Mame at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and around the world, and starred in regional, national and Australian touring productions of “Gypsy,” “Oliver!,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “The Ziegfeld Follies of 1956.” Her stage co-stars included Tallulah Bankhead, Celeste Holm, Susan Hayward, Constance Bennett, Jane Russell and Ron Moody.
Two 1978 films put her in front of very different audiences. She was Sister Mary Quacker in Cheech & Chong’s “Up in Smoke,” and a nurse in the Michael Crichton medical thriller “Coma,” starring Geneviève Bujold.
Her other film credits included “The Incredible Shrinking Woman” in 1981 and the 1997 horror picture “Wishmaster,” starring Robert Englund. Her most recent credit was the 2009 movie “Play the Game,” which also starred Andy Griffith and Doris Roberts.
Across a 70-year career, McGuire worked steadily in episodic television: “The Doris Day Show,” “Cannon,” “Columbo,” “Barnaby Jones,” “Baretta,” “Charlie’s Angels,” “Lou Grant,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Moonlighting,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Falcon Crest,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “Murphy Brown,” “ER” and “7th Heaven.” She also made one-off appearances on “Little House on the Prairie,” “MacGyver” and “CSI: Miami.”
A Talk Show on Channel 22
Retirement did not take her off camera. McGuire appeared on the “NBC Nightly News” in 2019 in a piece profiling her retirement home, where she hosted and produced her own talk show, “GabFest,” for Channel 22, the closed-circuit station on the campus. Rather than interview the famous residents around her, she devoted the show to the dreams and life stories of the staffers who worked there.
“I’m a happy camper,” she said in the segment. She was 92.
Away from performing, McGuire spent years volunteering as a receptionist and advocate for the Coalition for Economic Survival, a legal clinic that supports low-income tenants fighting eviction.
She leaves no surviving family members.
“To have the chance to do new things and different things at 92, can you think of anything better? I can’t,” McGuire said in the 2019 segment.