By   &  Updated  Nov 11, 2026, 10:01 AM EST follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap

When someone stumbles across a photo of Irene Ryan from the 1960s and then sees her character on , one question springs to mind: "How old was Irene Ryan when she played Granny?" As a main character throughout the , 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 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 ), 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.

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Since Beverly Hillbillies came out in the 1960s, the modernness it portrays is ultimately dated. On top of that, some of its jokes have aged poorly.

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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 , including that actress Bea Benaderet vouched for her on set. According to an interview with Ryan in the 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 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 ),

"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 ​​​​​​).

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. 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 ). 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.

Other TV Actors Who Played Characters Much Older Than Them

Estelle Getty From The Golden Girls Is A Perfect Example

There are plenty of actors who play characters younger than they really are, with TV shows like Beverly Hills 90210 and Euphoria as perfect examples. However, the cases of actors playing characters much older than they really are remains rarer. With that said, there is one great example of an actor playing someone older in a situation where they were actually younger in real life than the person who played their daughter. This was Estelle Getty on The Golden Girls.

Estelle Getty played Sophia, . Her daughter, Dorothy, was 55 on the show. However, there is an interesting bit of trivia about Getty and Bea Arthur, who played Dorothy. Arthur was 63 when she played 55-year-old Dorothy on the show. However, Estelle Getty was 62, one year younger than Arthur, when she played her mother on the show. This means that Arthur played a character eight years younger than she was, and Getty played 17 years older than her real age.

While Estelle Getty is the most famous example, other actors who played older than their real ages include Len Cariou, who played Henry Reagan in Blue Bloods (10 years older), and Paul Giamatti, who played the elderly John Adams in the biopic miniseries of the same name. While it is easier to see people playing younger characters, cases like The Beverly Hillbillies prove it can easily go both ways.

6.0/10 10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Like Follow Followed TV-G Family Release Date 1962 - 1971-00-00 Writers Paul Henning

Cast

• Buddy Ebsen
• Irene Ryan

Seasons 9 Expand Collapse

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