Strong and warm, June Lockhart was a model of TV motherhood

The actor, who died at 100, was known for radiating happiness and stability in roles.

- ROBERT LLOYD TELEVISION CRITIC

JUNE LOCKHART with a Lassie look-alike at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 2009 in North Hollywood. Lockhart joined the cast of the long-running television show "Lassie" as Ruth Martin in 1958.

(ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ Getty Images)

In the two decades following the end of the Second World War, the culture gods declared that — families should be nuclear, which is not to say atomic, and that women, who had joined the work force in record numbers with men away in the military should get back into the kitchen.

On TV it was, therefore, an age of mothers —wise domestic goddesses whose energies were turned largely toward the raising of children. Barbara Billingsley (June Cleaver in “Leave It to Beaver”), Jane Wyatt (Margaret Anderson on “Father Knows Best,” but did he, really?), Donna Reed (Donna Stone on “The Donna Reed Show”), Harriet Nelson (as ... Harriet Nelson on “The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet”) and, most certainly, the late June Lockhart, who played a mother on the boy-and-his-dog adventure series “Lassie” and on “Lost in Space,” Irwin Allen’s science-fictionification of “The Swiss Family Robinson.”

Pretty in an unintimidating way, with wide-set eyes, an upturned nose and a broad smile that made her instantly recognizable her entire life, Lockhart, who died Thursday at 100, played strong women with a sunny matter-of-factness, sometimes restricted by the prejudices of the time — which is to say, by what writers felt a woman on television could be shown to do— but always able to do what needed to be done. She might turn stern, or get upset, but her overarching qualities were predictability and stability, which is what any child wants from aparent, after all.