Cheryl Holdridge, the actress who first gained fame as a Mouseketeer on TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club in the 1950s, has died. She was 64.
Ms. Holdridge died Tuesday at her home in Santa Monica after a two-year battle with lung cancer, said Doreen Tracey, another former Mouseketeer.
Ms. Holdridge was 11 years old in the spring of 1956 when she auditioned and was hired for The Mickey Mouse Club, which debuted on Oct. 3, 1955 with 24 youngsters who sang and danced and came across as the kids next door. Ms. Holdridge joined the Mouseketeers in the second season of the show, which ran until 1959.
She quickly became part of the core group that appeared on the famous Mouseketeer roll-call at the start of each show, along with Tracey, Annette Funicello, Tommy Cole, Cubby O’Brien, Sharon Baird, Bobby Burgess, Karen Pendleton, Lonnie Burr and Darlene Gillespie.
“Annette had the highest rating [fan mail], but Cheryl came pretty close,” Tracey said.
She went on to play Wally Cleaver’s girlfriend, Julie Foster, for two seasons on Leave It to Beaver. And she had guest roles on The Rifleman , Bachelor Father, My Three Sons, Bewitched and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
She left the business in 1964 when she married Lance Reventlow, the son of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, she said, “because that’s what you did then. You married and stayed home.”
Reventlow died in a plane crash in 1972. In 1994, Ms. Holdridge married Manning Post, a prominent West Coast Democratic Party fundraiser and adviser, who died in 2000.
Ms. Holdridge had no immediate surviving family members.
