Elizabeth MacRae, Gomer Pyle’s Gal, General Hospital Tragedian, & Don Knotts’ Fishy Flirt Dead At 88

Elizabeth MacRae, probably best known for her courtship with Jim Nabors’ easily awed Gomer Pyle and her time as misery-prone Meg Bentley in General Hospital has died. She was 88.

Elizabeth MacRae, Rest In Peace

Per her obituary, MacRae passed peacefully on Monday, May 27 at Highland House Rehabilitation and Healthcare in Fayetteville, North Carolina from which she originally hailed.

Upon graduating from the Washington-based Hoton-Arms — a college-preparatory school — MacRae booked it to Atlanta, Georgia in the hopes of booking the lead in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan. She didn’t. Jean Seberg got the tap. But effusive praise on Preminger’s part spurred her on to New York where she studied under the auspice of acting dynamo Uta Hagen and gained invaluable experience trodding the boards in several off-Broadway productions.

National exposure came via an episode of courtroom dramatization The Verdict Is Yours, and MacRae subsequently added to her resume guest stints in Route 66, Surfside 6, Rendezvous, The Fugitive, Bonanza, I Dream of Jeannie, and more.

1961 saw the nascent thespian appear in two feature films: Everything’s Ducky and Love in a Goldfish Bowl, and from 1962 to 1964 she was by Ken Curtis’s Deputy Marshal Festus Haggen in Gunsmoke. In between, she had a brief bit in For Love or Money (1963), shimmied and shook in Wild Is My Love (1963), and had Don Knotts flummoxed with her turn as animated Ladyfish in The Incredible Mr. Limpet (1964).

MacRae so impressed the makers of Gomer Pyle: USMC that her intended one-and-done performance as lounge singer Lou-Ann Poovie was expanded into a recurring role that encompassed a further 14 episodes, taking her right into the sitcom’s final season in 1969.

That same year, she joined the cast General Hospital, succeeding Meg Bentley’s originator, Patricia Breslin. By the time MacRae’s tenure came to a close in 1973, at which point Meg Baldwin (as she was then known) succumbed to a fatal blood-pressure-induced stroke, her alter-ego had battled breast cancer and suffered several indignities heaped upon her by near-do-well stepdaughter Brooke and adulterous husband Lee.