Barbara was 19 when Life with the Lyons first took to the air on 5 November

Barbara was 19 when Life with the Lyons first took to the air on 5 November 1950, and was touching 30 when the series finished in 1961. The opening lines stayed the same for all the 300-odd episodes: “I’m Richard Lyon! I’m Barbara Lyon! I’m Ben Lyon! And I’m Bebe Daniels Lyon!”
Bebe and Ben were the rock-solid stars upon whom the series was built. Those were beautiful years for me.” In those years, she knew Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker, Chaplin and Barrymore, and was a frequent guest to San Simeon, the Xanadu of William Randolph Hearst – no wonder she called it “the delirious decade”. One could sympathise if everything thereafter was an anticlimax. Yet, in one of her last letters to me she said how full her life was, even in her eighties. “It is simply incredible how busy one can be without working.”. Barbara Lyon, actress: born Hollywood 9 September 1931; married 1956 Russell Turner, 1968 Colin Birkett (one son); died London 10 July 1995.

Beautiful Barbara Lyon, curvaceous and charming, was for millions of British listeners radio’s perfect teenager, the love-lorn daughter of showbiz’s unique happy family – unique because they were the only radio family that was a real one. It wasn’t at all the way it was pictured in all those gossip columns. She married the director Tay Garnett, and wrote radio scripts, screenplays, award- winning short stories and even a novel. Divorcing Garnett, she married the screenwriter Jon Lee Mahin (Scarface, Too Hot to Handle), noted for right-wing political views which Miller shared. In 1951 she married Effingham Smith Deans, a New York importer of Scottish origin.Patsy’s brother Winston Miller, a child actor in silents, graduated to writing screenplays; he co-authored My Darling Clementine (1946) for John Ford.

Patsy wrote her life-story with Jeffrey Carrier, published in 1988 as My Hollywood – When Both of Us Were Young. She was fortunate in her publisher, Philip Riley, who added to it the script of Hunchback and printed it to a superb standard. It is now a collector’s item.”I just decided to write about Hollywood as I knew it. “Patsy Ruth Miller runs away with the picture as far as the story is concerned,” ran a review of The White Black Sheep (1926).Miller’s Hollywood career lasted for 70 films over 10 years – 1921 to 1931.

Rumour had it that her voice was unsuitable for talkies, but this was not true; she acted successfully in several plays. In the only one I’ve seen, Red Hot Tires (1926), she is superb. It was while making The First Auto (1927) that her co-star, Charles Emmet Mack, was killed in a car crash. He had asked Miller to come with him to watch the racetrack scenes being shot, but her maid insisted that she rest; almost certainly, she saved her life.In the mid-Twenties, Miller was landed with a number of what were known as “poverty row” productions – cheap pictures made at speed for undemanding audiences But she didn’t behave like a Big Star, and was unaffected She was soon regarded as a considerable actress. “I adored that man – such humour; wicked, but never malicious, always sweet Here was a director who directed. “Bring the one and only man in your life over for dinner,” Lubitsch would say, “Whoever he is this week.”Warner Bros featured her in a number of comedies by lesser directors, including Roy del Ruth and Charles Riesner, some of these being her Monte Blue pictures. And if there is anything an actor feels he cannot do – we will not change the scene, we will change the actor.’ ” Miller was reported to be engaged with a number of fascinating men – John Monk Saunders, Donald Ogden Stewart.