Early Life
Billingsley was born Barbara Lillian Combes in 1915 in Los Angeles, California, the youngest child of patrolman Robert Collyer Combes (1891–1950) and his first wife, the former Lillian Agnes McLaughlin. She had one elder sibling, Elizabeth (1911–1992). Her parents divorced sometime before her fourth birthday, and her father, who later became an assistant chief of police, remarried. After her divorce, Lillian Combes went to work as a foreman at a knitting mill.
Billingsley fell in love with drama in the second grade, and during her years at George Washington High School in Los Angeles (now Washington Preparatory High School), she performed in all the school plays. She was voted "Class Queen", and graduated from George Washington in 1934.
She used the name Barbara Combes until 1941, when she wed her first husband, Glenn Billingsley. At that time, she began to use Barbara Billingsley.
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Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)