Classic Films

Janet Landgard, who played Karen on The Donna Reed Show, has died. She was 75 years old. Paul Petersen, who costarred with Landgard in the 1960s ABC sitcom, told The Hollywood Reporter that she passed away this week after a brief battle with brain cancer.

“She never told me how gravely ill she was from the cancer that took her life earlier this week,” Petersen wrote on Facebook on Friday. “Typical behavior from the best TV girlfriend my alternate ego, Jeff Stone, ever had on the last three years of The Donna Reed Show. Janet was gorgeous, inside and out… a flawless Scandinavian beauty that literally stunned jaded Hollywood types into silence.”

Landgard was born on December 2, 1947, and raised in Pasadena, California. She was still a high schooler when she started her screen career in 1963, guest-starring as a different character on The Donna Reed Show and popping up in an episode of My Three Sons.

Landgard’s other screen credits include three films, 1968’s The Swimmer — in which she played a young woman whom Burt Lancaster’s character formerly hired as a babysitter — as well as 1969’s Land Raiders and 1972’s Moonchild. She also joined Lloyd Bridges and Janet Leigh in the 1971 TV movie The Deadly Dream.