Cara Williams

Cara Williams (born Bernice Kamiat; June 29, 1925 – December 9, 2021) was an American film and television actress.

She was best known for her role as Billy's Mother in The Defiant Ones (1958), for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, and her role as Gladys Porter on the 1960–62 CBS television series Pete and Gladys, for which she was nominated for the Emmy Award for Best Lead Actress in a Comedy.

[2] She began making impersonations of all the screen stars she watched in the movies there and knew she wanted to be an actress.

Her parents divorced, and her mother relocated her to Los Angeles, where she chose Cara Williams as her stage name and attended the Hollywood Professional School.

Her third husband was New York-born Los Angeles real-estate entrepreneur Asher Dann (né Jagoda; the couple remained together until his death in 2018, aged 83.

She had supporting roles in the Oscar-nominated films Boomerang (1947) directed by Elia Kazan, and (uncredited) in Sitting Pretty (1948).

Williams appeared in four episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents: "Decoy" (1956), "De Mortuis" (1956), "Last Request" (1957), and "The Cure" (1960).

For the next two years, while still under contract to the network, CBS kept her in the public eye by repeating Pete and Gladys episodes as part of its morning line-up, an unusual move for a short-run series.

She resided in Los Angeles and was married to a real-estate entrepreneur (and former actor) Asher Dann (né Jagoda), her third husband, until his death in 2018.

Harry Morgan and Williams on set of Pete and Gladys (1960)