Elen Willard

Elen Willard is a retired American character actress. She worked exclusively in various American network dramatic television series from 1960 to 1966. Her very first aired performance was a supporting role in a 1960 episode of the short-lived CBS detective series, Markham, which starred Ray Milland.

Successively, over a six-year period, Willard portrayed twenty-four characters in twenty different dramatic television series consisting of various featured guest star and supporting performances, including most notably Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond, Outlaws, Perry Mason, Ben Casey, Dr. Kildare, Combat!, Gunsmoke, Whispering Smith, and Have Gun - Will Travel.

In her Ben Casey episode, "A Dark Night for Billy Harris", Willard plays the wife of the title character (a young Bruce Dern), who has fallen victim to a seriously disturbed, trigger-happy cop, played by the pre-Kojak Telly Savalas.^[1][2]

But Willard's best known performance, comprising a mere collective five minutes of screen time, is almost certainly her portrayal of the character Ione Sykes in the 1961 Twilight Zone episode, "The Grave".^[3] A gothic-themed western, written and directed by Montgomery Pittman, the episode affords Willard not merely its pivotal scene (in which Conny Miller, the singularly nicknamed protagonist played by Lee Marvin, is given a serious, potentially life-threatening scare), but also its final word, with which she utterly—and gleefully–refutes the "rational explanation" that had briefly offered some respite from the episode's overriding sense of foreboding; thus, fellow characters and audience members alike are left, at the closing credits, in much the same state as Conny Miller had been, previously.^[4]

In December 1962, Alcoa Premiere cast Willard alongside Susanne Pleshette and Viveca Lindfors, as Jennifer Cooke, the British member of an international trio of Best Actress contenders at a film festival held in France. The episode, entitled "Competition", co-stars Chester Morris as a Hollywood producer.^[5][6]

During the final two years of Willard's career, she guest starred in four separate episodes of the ABC/Quinn Martin World War II based series Twelve O'Clock High.^{[7][8][9][10]}

Willard's last broadcast appearance, credited as Ellen Willard, was as Salvation Army worker Priscilla Worth in a Christmas-themed episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. entitled "The Jingle Bells Affair",^[11][12] which was initially aired Friday, December 23, 1966.^[13]

Actor Earl Holliman, who guest starred opposite her in the second of her four appearances in Twelve O'Clock High, said in an interview for a book on that series published in 2005 that he had "... heard she had quit acting because it was such an emotionally painful experience for her."^[14][4][8]