Leslie Parrish, Star of 'Li'l Abner' and 'The Manchurian Candidate,' Dies at 90
Leslie Parrish, the actress who played Daisy Mae in the 1959 film musical Li'l Abner and delivered what she called her favourite role as Jocelyn Jordan in The Manchurian Candidate, has died at 90. Parrish, who lived in Washington state, died late in 2024; the death was confirmed by Erica Berdan, a daughter of Parrish's second husband, the author Richard Bach (The Hollywood Reporter).
Born Marjorie Hellen on 18 March 1935 in Melrose, Massachusetts, Parrish was raised in Upper Black Eddy, Pennsylvania, where she studied piano before moving to New York in 1953. She worked as a model for the Conover Agency, and 20th Century Fox signed her in 1954. The following year brought her first credited film appearances in A Man Called Peter, Daddy Long Legs, and The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing.
Her breakout came as Daisy Mae, the eternal sweetheart of the cartoon hillbilly Li'l Abner, in the 1959 screen adaptation of the Al Capp comic strip. She starred opposite Peter Palmer, who had originated the title role on Broadway and repeated it for the film. Palmer himself died in 2021, also at 90.
In The Manchurian Candidate (1962), John Frankenheimer's Cold War thriller, Parrish played Jocelyn Jordan, daughter of a liberal senator whose romance with a brainwashed war veteran becomes a piece in a political conspiracy. She called it her favourite role (The Hollywood Reporter). The film, starring Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury, has endured as one of the most closely studied American political thrillers ever made.
Parrish worked steadily across the 1960s. She starred opposite Vic Morrow in Portrait of a Mobster (1961), played one of Thelma Ritter's daughters alongside Kirk Douglas in For Love or Money (1963), and appeared as a patient of Janet Leigh's who dates Jerry Lewis in Three on a Couch (1966). On television, she guest-starred in more than 100 shows across her career, including a memorable 1967 appearance on Star Trek as Carolyn Palamas, the archaeology and anthropology officer who catches the eye of the god-like being Apollo in the episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?" That same year she turned up on Batman as Glacia Glaze, an ice-skating henchwoman for Mr. Freeze.
After marrying Richard Bach in 1981, Parrish moved into producing. She served as an associate producer on the 1973 film Jonathan Livingston Seagull, adapted from Bach's bestselling novella about a philosophical gull, though the credits listed her only as a "researcher." The couple divorced in 1999.
Parrish later became known as an activist and environmentalist in Washington state. Her career — from studio contract player to comic-strip heroine to Cold War thriller, and finally to producer and advocate — spanned one of Hollywood's most turbulent and generative eras.
