Rosemary DeCamp was born November 14, 1910 in Prescott, Arizona. Her soft, beautiful
looks won her a host of roles that spanned a rich television and movie career.
At differing times in her life, Rosemary could play the seductive leading lady or the sweet innocent sister. And she made a graceful transformation to the gentle "momma" type as she portrayed for Helen Marie, Ann's mother in That Girl. She managed to allow her TV husband, Lew Parker (as Lou Marie) to take center stage to her "straight-man", while still coming off as a strong presence. From her earliest stage work onward, American actress Rosemary DeCamp played character roles that belied her youth and fresh-scrubbed attractiveness. On radio, DeCamp developed the vocal timbre that enabled her to portray a rich variety (and age-range) of characters. A peripheral performer on One Man's Family at 21, DeCamp showed up on several radio soap operas and anthologies before settling into the role of Nurse Judy Price on the Dr. Christian series in 1937, which she continued for 16 years. DeCamp made her film bow in Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), in which she and most of the cast were required to "age" several decades. With The Jungle Book (1941), the actress played the first of her many mother roles. The most famous examples of DeCamp's specialized film work are Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), in which she was the Irish-American mother of George M. Cohan (James Cagney, who was 14 years her senior), and Rhapsody in Blue (1945), in which she played George Gershwin's Jewish mother (Gershwin was impersonated by Robert Alda, who was one year younger than DeCamp). Even when playing a character close to her own age, such as the Red Cross worker in Pride of the Marines (1945), DeCamp's interest in the leading man (in this case the same-aged John Garfield) was strictly maternal. On television, DeCamp was Peg Riley to Jackie Gleason's Chester A. Riley on the original 1949 run of The Life of Riley. She also played rakish Bob Cummings' levelheaded sister Margaret in Love That Bob (1955-59). 
In 1966 she began her most popular role as Marlo Thomas' mother, Helen Marie
on That Girl (1966-70). In 1965, Rosemary subbed for her old friend Ronald Reagan
as host on Death Valley Days; FCC rules of the time compelled the removal of Reagan's
scenes when the show was telecast in California, where he was running for governor.
Upon Reagan's election, Robert Taylor took over as host, but DeCamp was installed
as permanent commercial spokesperson for 20 Mule Team Borax.
She had a short run in the sitcom, Petticoat Junction (when series star Bea Benederet
passed away), and she went on to play the part of Shirley Partridge's mother in
The Partridge Family in the 70's. She also appeared in the remake of The Time
Machine. Semi-retired for several years, DeCamp reemerged in 1981 for a "de-campy"
cameo part, as Aunt Lucille, in the horror spoof Saturday the 14th.
As of the time this site went live (in 1996), she was living in California and was doing well, though Rosemary had become deaf. She communicated by typewriter, and continued to be an upbeat and cheerful lady. Sadly however, on February 20, 2001, Rosemary DeCamp passed away of complications from pneumonia, at age 90. You can read the news report here. Here is a complete filmography for Rosemary DeCamp:
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