Who doesn’t love a good rags-to-riches story? In 1962, CBS struck gold with The Beverly Hillbillies cast in a sitcom about a backwoods family who packed up and moved from the Ozarks to California after finding oil on their land. Jed Clampett and his colorful relatives quickly became iconic TV characters and are still loved by fans more than 60 years after the show premiered. Given that it’s been decades since the show aired, most of the cast is no longer with us. However, one Beverly Hillbillies cast member – Max Baer Jr. – is still living in 2023.
Max Baer Jr. starred in ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ cast as Jethro Bodine
Baer played Jethro Bodine in The Beverly Hillbillies. The character is the cousin of the Clampett family patriarch Jed (Buddy Ebsen). He moves with his family from Missouri to California after they strike it rich. He’s excited about his new life in Beverly Hills, but his country bumpkin ways and lack of education often result in him ending up in amusing situations. Jethro’s inability to find a stable job or career is a common theme on the show.
Are any of the original cast of ‘The Beverly Hillbillies’ still alive?
Baer was born in 1937. He’s the son of boxing heavyweight champion Max Baer. In the early 1960s, he began his career in Hollywood with appearances in TV shows such as Maverick, Sugarfoot, 77 Sunset Strip, and Cheyenne. Before long, he landed his career-defining role as Jethro in The Beverly Hillbillies.
Baer appeared in all nine seasons and nearly every episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. Unfortunately, he was so associated with the character that after the show ended in 1971, he found it difficult to get work as an actor. The typecasting led him to self-produce the 1974 movie Macon County Line. He played a vengeful sheriff hunting the men who murdered his wife in the movie, which was a surprise hit.
“I was basically unemployable because all that people knew me as was Jethro, and I realized that if I’m going to work, I will have to do it myself,” he told the Tampa Tribune in a 2000 interview (via MeTV).
Later, Baer directed the movies The Wild McCullochs and Ode to Billy Joe and appeared in episodes of Fantasy Island and Murder, She Wrote. In the early 2000s, he planned to open a Beverly Hillbillies-themed casino near Carson City, Nevada, but the project never came to fruition.
Though he retired from acting decades ago, Baer is still alive. Now 85, he is the last surviving member of the main cast of The Beverly Hillbillies.
What happened to the cast of ‘Beverly Hillbillies’?
Baer became the last living Beverly Hillbillies star in 2015, following the death of Donna Douglas, who played Jed’s daughter Ella May Clampett.
Buddy Ebsen, whose Hollywood career spanned seven decades, died in 2003 at age 95. Irene Ryan, a former vaudeville star who played Granny Clampett, died in 1973 at age 70, after experiencing a stroke.
As for Baer, he knows he’ll always be Jethro to fans.
“I was born Max Baer Jr., the son of a great boxer, and I’ll die Jethro Bodine. Period,” he told Fore Magazine in 2017. “I never really got the chance to be me.’’
Sources: TCM, The New York Times
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