Summary

• Irene Ryan was a seasoned performer with a successful career in vaudeville, radio, movies, and TV before her iconic role as Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies.
• Despite Ryan's success on the show, she lived in constant fear of being fired and hustled to stay relevant in the entertainment industry.
• Ryan was only 59 when she first played Granny, who was written to be much older. Makeup was used to age her.

When someone stumbles across a photo of Irene Ryan from the 1960s and then sees her character on The Beverly Hillbillies, one question springs to mind: "How old was Irene Ryan when she played Granny?" As a main characters throughout the nine seasons of The Beverly Hillbillies, Daisy May Moses, better known as "Granny", was a fixture of '60s and '70s television. Jed's mother-in-law, Granny, is a shotgun-toting, mountain medicine-applying, short-tempered woman who has little patience for the easy, breezy lifestyles of Beverly Hills, California, and always makes sure to let everyone know she's a country girl at heart.

While The Beverly Hillbillies may be one of those '60s sitcoms lost to time and all the network television that came afterward, in the moment, it was hugely popular. Even with big names like Erika Eleniak as Ellie May and Buddy Ebsen as Jed, it's hard to deny that Irene Ryan's Granny was a key reason for the show's success. Her bristly edges hid a soft inner core that made her a delightful, zany character, capable of everything from singlehandedly tossing police officers out of her mansion to catching and cooking up raccoons for dinner.

Who Is The Beverly Hillbillies's Irene Ryan

Granny Is Played By A Vaudeville, Radio And Movie Veteran

Irene Ryan played Granny for the entire run of the series, and it's the role she's best known for, but she had a respectable career beforehand and an acclaimed one after. Born Irene Noblette in El Paso in 1902 (via The New York Times), Irene met her husband, Tim Ryan, while working in vaudeville, and the Ryans went into radio when vaudeville began drying up. The pair spent most of their careers on radio, hosting "Tim and Irene", a nationally listened-to podcast.

Later in her career, in the 1940s, Ryan found steady work in movies like Rockabilly Baby as Eunice Johnson, Diary of a Chambermaid as Louise, and Half Angel as Nurse Kay. She also found success on television, with small roles in The Real McCoys, Bringing Up Buddy, and My Three Sons. Irene was not desperate for work, but she still did not have that breakthrough role that would rocket her to stardom. That all changed with her audition for Granny in The Beverly Hillbillies.

It wasn't easy to get that audition, however. There are a few rumors about how Ryan got the role in The Beverly Hillbillies, including that actress Bea Benaderet vouched for her on set. According to an interview with Ryan in the El Paso Times from 1963, the casting director for The Beverly Hillbillies told Ryan she was too young for the part. Undeterred, Irene called up the show's creator, Paul Henning, and told him,

"Look, Paul, do I have to go home and get my grey wig and shawl to convince you? If you get anybody older to play the role, she wont be able to stand the pace. I know what those 7-to-7 schedules are like."

However, Henning himself corroborates the Bea story. He tells Emmy TV Legends in an emblematic tale of Ryan,

"Irene Ryan had paid us a visit... and she came by the office. We had used her on The Dennis Day Show... and she came by, and I said 'Irene, do you think you can play the part of a hillbilly?'

And she said, 'Are you kidding?... I was at a stock company when we played a theater in Arkansas... We kept waiting for the curtain to go up backstage... and finally the curtain didn’t go up and there were nobody in the theater. So we went up and talked to the manager and [asked] why [he] didn’t let the people in. And he said that if he’d let them in before the curtain came up, they would whittle away the seats. So I know hillbilly.'

So when we had the screen tests and Bea Benaderet was there to try out for the role of Granny. And as soon as Irene Ryan read the part, Bea came over to me and she says, ' There’s Granny'. She was just wonderful."

Despite it seeming like all the stars had aligned for Ryan and The Beverly HIllbillies, Ryan never felt like her position on the show was secure. In an interview with Star Gazette in 1965, in the midst of The Beverly Hillbillies' popularity, Ryan shared that in the back of her mind, she was still nervous about being fired from the show. She said (via MeTV),

"I'm the first one on the set for every scene. All my life, I've been on time. I was always scared I would be fired. And you know something. I'm still scared."

Ryan had spent her whole life hustling for work. She traveled for vaudeville, pivoted to radio, and jumped to television and movies when they were made available to her. Even after her immense success on The Beverly Hillbillies, Ryan could not shake that trained instinct to constantly be prepared for when an entertainment job might be cut short.

Irene Ryan Was 59 Years Old When She First Played Granny In The Beverly Hillbillies

Ryan Was Nearly A Decade Younger Than Granny

The strange thing about Irene Ryan playing Granny is that in 1962, the first year of the show, Ryan was only 59. However, Granny, who has strong feelings about the Civil War and other 19th-century events, is supposed to be in her 80s. She's Jed's mother-in-law after all, who is no spring chicken himself, as Granny would say. Even by the time the show ended in 1971, Ryan was not yet 70, still nowhere near Granny's age, who would have been in her 90s. To make Ryan appear decades older, production applied a significant amount of makeup (via WGTC​​​​​​).

Wrinkles, shadows, and, of course, a wig, were all added to Ryan to make her appear much older than she actually was. The Beverly Hillbillies' makeup department used the same techniques that would later be used in The Golden Girls. This makeup and costuming worked wonders. On the 1960s and 1970s American television sets, it was almost impossible to tell that anything had been done to the actor. Now, with updated graphics and HD, some of the cracks are a little easier to see in Ryan's makeup, but it's not distracting in the least.

Ryan Found Success On Broadway After The Beverly Hillbillies

Irene's Turn In Pippin Earned Her A Tony Nomination

Once The Beverly Hillbillies ended, Irene Ryan essentially retired from acting in films and television. Instead, she chose to focus on theater, harkening back to her stage roots, as Ryan said in the El Paso Times,

"Nothing will ever take the place of the live stage for an actor, but television's here to stay, and it's about the greatest entertainment medium we've ever known."

She ended up appearing in the Bob Fosse Broadway musical Pippin, where she played the grandmother, Berthe. Ryan earned a Tony Award nomination in 1973 for Best Featured Actress In a Musical to add to her two Emmy nominations for Outstanding Continued Performance by an Actress in a Series in 1963 and 1964 for The Beverly Hillbillies. Irene's performance of the song "No Time at All" was celebrated and became a huge hit. The New York Times said about her performance,

"In 'Pippin,' as those who have seen the show know, she was on stage for only about ten minutes and stopped the show cold. John Rubinstein was left on stage after her exit unable to speak his next line until her applause diminished."

This was at 70 years old, and Ryan was quite diminutive as well, standing at 5'2". Yet, she hung around with the stagehands after her part in Pippin, standing long after she needed to and dealing with the chaos of what goes on behind the curtain at Broadway shows. She had the energy of people half her age. Thanks to her investments and savings throughout her life, Ryan had a net worth of $1 million at the time of her passing on April 26, 1973, at the age of 70. She had acted right up until the time of her death.

Ryan suffered a stroke on stage while performing and had flown back to LA, where she passed. The causes of death were listed as glioblastoma and arteriosclerotic heart disease (via Beaver County Times). Irene Ryan loved acting, maybe more than anything, and the fact she did it right up to her death is a tenacity that Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies would have respected.