Judy Nugent, actress who starred in one of the first television sitcoms – obituary

Judy Nugent, who has died aged 83, was a child actor who got her start in 1949 on the early US sitcom The Ruggles; on the big screen, she was best known in two classic Douglas Sirk melodramas, Magnificent Obsession and There’s Always Tomorrow, while in a 1954 episode of The Adventures of Superman she played a blind girl whose sight is restored by the superhero.

Judy Ann Nugent was born on August 22 1940 in Los Angeles, where her father, Carl Nugent, was a props man with MGM (he fixed up Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, with his tail in The Wizard of Oz); her mother, Lucille Jane Redd, was a theatrical agent who had been a child actress herself, in the “Our Gang” comedies. Judy’s canny father would regularly paste photos of her and her older sister Carol on his prop box at the MGM lot, which attracted attention from actors and producers.

The upshot was uncredited roles for the Nugent girls in the 1943 Charles Laughton drama The Man from Down Under (1943), and for the next few years Judy had other small parts, in such films as It Had to Be You (1947), in which she played the five-year-old version of the film’s lead (Ginger Rogers), a woman swept off her feet by a dashing fireman played by Cornel Wilde; her sister Carol played the six-year-old version.

Judy renewed her on-screen acquaintance with Charles Laughton in the film noir The Big Clock (1948), then made a brief appearance in Tony Curtis’s film debut as a young delinquent in the thriller City Across the River (1949).

Then came her first substantial role, in The Ruggles. One of the first TV shows to be shot in Hollywood rather than New York, it went out live, but without a studio audience or a laugh-track. Judy Nugent was unfazed by the pressured environment – “I was so little it didn’t drive me crazy. Something clicked,” she recalled.

She played Donna Ruggles, twin to Donald (played by Jimmy Hawkins, one of James Stewart’s children in It’s a Wonderful Life), and daughter of insurance agent Charlie (played by the character actor Charles Ruggles).

A wholesome family affair, its plots centred on such dramas as disputes over who got to use the bathroom first in the morning, and the children persuading Charlie to go square dancing. The series came to an end in 1952 after more than 130 episodes, culminating in the marriage of Donna’s older sister Sharon.

Judy Nugent went on to appear in two Douglas Sirk films. In Magnificent Obsession (1954), starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, she played a cheeky tomboy who comforts Jane Wyman’s blinded widow, while in There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) she played one of Fred McMurray’s daughters. In Navy Wife, released the same year, she played a young woman living in post-war Japan whose independence and self-reliance inspires the local women.

Her work on television included The Lone Ranger, Lassie and Rawhide. In a 1954 episode of The Adventures of Superman she played a blind girl who is cured when George Reeves’s superhero discovers a shard of glass lodged in her optic nerve following a car crash. He then takes her on an aerial circumnavigation to see the world – “I was told never to tell anyone about how George Reeves flew,” she recalled.

In 1961 Judy Nugent married the actor Buck Taylor, who would go on to play the gunsmith-turned-deputy Newly O’Brian in the series Gunsmoke, and retired to start a family, though she did appear in a couple of independent films in the 1970s. A self-described tomboy, in 1981 she worked as a stunt rider and body double in the Western Cattle Annie and Little Britches, starring Burt Lancaster and Rod Steiger, which was shot on location in Durango, Mexico.

Judy Nugent spent her last few decades on her ranch in Montana. She divorced Buck Taylor in 1983 and is survived by a daughter and two sons; another son was killed in a motorbike accident in his twenties.

Judy Nugent, born August 22 1940, died October 26 2023