Dona Hardy, also known as Donna Hardy (December 3, 1912 – February 13, 2011) was an American film and television actress.
Born as Jean Dona Barley, the Los Angeles-born Hardy began her acting career very late in life, in her mid-70s in 1987, usually playing sweet, sometimes deceptively harmless-looking old ladies. Her last role was in 2010. In the early 1930s she she toured the United States with a dance troupe, but left and returned to her native Los Angeles during the Depression. She dated an up and coming, but still largely unknown, actor named Anthony Quinn but left him for someone she liked better.[1]
During her acting career, she bedded John Ritter, kissed Matthew Perry and was asked by faux-auteur Jerry Stiller (in The King of Queens) to consider "some tasteful nudity" for a community theater production of The Gin Game. Hardy worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Richard Dawson in her first film credit, the Stephen King-penned thriller, The Running Man[2], in which she had played "Mrs. McArdle" and had to say a certain 12 letter hyphenated vulgarism. "There is nothing that people enjoy so much as hearing old people say dirty words.... I don't know what's so attractive about that, but every old lady knows she is going to be asked to say the 'F' word sooner or later."[3] Her second film credit, When Harry Met Sally, was her favorite film.
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She married Irving Hardekopf in 1946; the couple adopted a son and remained together until his death in 1980. Widowed, she adapted her acting name from a shortened version of her married name. In 2009, she relocated with her son, Bill, a former president/general manager of the Birmingham Barons, to the Birmingham area, where she died on February 13, 2011, aged 98.