Betty Harford, Actress on ‘Dynasty’ and ‘The Paper Chase,’ Dies at 98

Betty Harford, who played Mrs. Nottingham, John Houseman’s secretary, on The Paper Chase and Mrs. Gummerson, the Carrington family cook, on Dynasty, has died. She was 98.

Harford died Nov. 2 in Santa Barbara, her friend Wendy Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter.

On the big screen, Harford cared for Sandra Dee’s Rosalie Stocker in The Wild and the Innocent (1959) and portrayed the opportunistic older sister of Natalie Wood’s unstable title character in Inside Daisy Clover (1965), the melodrama directed by Robert Mulligan.

Harford had acted in Houseman’s UCLA Theatre Group in the 1960s and played a nurse for director James Bridges in the Richard Thomas-starring 1977 film September 30, 1955 — that’s the day James Dean died in a car crash — when she was cast as the secretary for law school professor Charles W. Kingsfield (Houseman) on the CBS drama The Paper Chase.

She showed up as the prickly but efficient Mrs.