Whatever Happened to the Cast of ‘Family Affair’? All of the Stars’ Joys and Tragedies

Sebastian Cabot (Giles French)

The London-born actor arrived in the world on July 6, 1918, with the name Charles Sebastian Thomas Cabot. He left school at age 14 and began working in an automobile garage where he also worked as a valet and chauffer to Frank Pettingell, a British actor. Developing an interest in acting (as well as cooking), Sebastian lied about his previous experience to get into a repertory company. He did find employment, impressed with himself over the fact he had never had any sot of training, but ended up getting fired on his first day. Despite this, he kept at it, became more confident and began scoring roles.

Film Roles

His early film credits include an uncredited role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Affaires (1935), Tehran (1946), Third Time Lucky (1949), Old Mother Riley’s New Venture (1949), Romeo and Juliet (1954), Westward Ho the Wagons! (1956), The Angry Hills (1959) and The Time Machine (1960). He also began voicing characters for animated Disney films, including The Sword in the Stone (1963), as Lord Ector; The Jungle Book (1967), as Bagheera the black panther and as narrator of the animated theatrical shorts of Winnie the Pooh (and Tigger, too!) from the 1960s. In the 1950s he also started appearing on British television and made the move to such American shows as Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Three Musketeers (playing Porthos), Gunsmoke, The Twilight Zone and Mister Ed. He was a regular on Checkmate (1959 to 1962) and The Beachcomber (1962). In 1966 he joined the cast of Family Affair as Mr. French.

Immediate Success

The success of Family Affair was pretty immediate and that in turn started making people think that he was very similar to Mr. French in real life — not helped by the fact that his character in Checkmate wasn’t too dissimilar from French. “I am not at all like them,” he proclaimed to the Detroit Free Press in 1966. “I have one suit. This is it. I am not happy unless I am dressed in old clothes with my shirttail out. If you want the real Sebastian Cabot, you can find him fishing off Vancouver Island in British Columbia looking completely disreputable.”

Scene-Stealer

Although at the time of the show reviewers felt he stole things right out from his fellow cast members in terms of their scenes, he argued few actors stood a chance against three cute kid actors. “All I can do is be a sounding board for them,” he said. “Oh, you can use scene-stealing tricks to take attention. But the tricks always show. I try to be honest and I don’t think French gets overshadowed.”

In the Sunday News of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he said of co-star Brian Keith, “We have enormous respect for one another as actors and we are both very short-fused when it comes to inefficiency on the set. We respect each other’s moods. If I see that Brian is engrossed in his own thoughts, I have sense enough to go right by. I say a short good morning. In three months of working together, we haven’t had a cross word.”

Legacy

Following Family Affair he served as host Winston Essex on the series Ghost Story, guest starred on a few shows and starred in the TV movies Miracle on 34^th Street (1973) and The City That Forgot About Christmas (1974).

He was married to Kathleen Rose Humphreys from 1944 until his death from a massive stroke on December 12, 1977, at the age of 59. They had three children.

Kathy Garver (Catherine Allison Rachael “Cissy” Patterson Davis)

Kathleen Marie Garver was born December 13, 1945 in Long Beach, California. Becoming interested in acting when she was about 9, Kathy managed to score some uncredited roles in The Night of the Hunter (1955), I’ll Cry Tomorrow (1955), The Bad Seed (1956) and, as a child slave, The Ten Commandments (1956). Her first credited performance was in Monkey on My Back (1957), which she followed with Kiss Me, Stupid (1964). On TV she guest starred on Our Miss Brooks, Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, Father Knows Best, The Rifleman, Dr. Kildare and The Patty Duke Show. She was a regular on This is Alice (1958).

Other Ventures

At the time of Family Affair, Kathy made it pretty clear that she was OK if her acting career came to an end; that she actually had more interest in finishing her college education and maybe someday getting married and having kids. As to the show, if she had any frustrations towards it, it was that they wouldn’t really let her grow up, though she did make some progress in that area over time.

Following Family Affair, she began doing voiceover work in such animated series as The Fonz and the Happy Days Gang, Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, The New Yogi Bear, The Real Ghost Busters and more. She also went back to guest starring on different shows, her last being a 2020 episode of TV Therapy. She also appeared in a couple of dozen feature films.

Life Update

In early 2020, she starred in the web series Aunt Cissy, reprising her role. The show is officially described as follows: “Cissy hit the big time as a teenager in New York City, becoming one of the top models and actresses of her generation. Now she lives in Los Angeles, and is about to retire from show biz in order to live a new, adventurous life roaming the world with her fiance, hot shot film producer, Robert, when who should show up on her doorstep but her twin niece and nephew, needing a place to live! Will she leave town and lead a life of adventure, or will she give up her plans and stay with her family?” Guess the answer.

She has produced, narrated, written lyrics and composed the music for eight Beatrix Potter audio adventures and eight more focusing on Mother Goose. Additionally, she cowrote The Family Affair Cookbook and her autobiography, Surviving Cissy: My Family Affair of Life in Hollywood. She and David Travis have been married since 1981 and they have one son.

Anissa Jones (Elizabeth “Buffy” Patterson Davis)

Definitely the saddest story amongst the Family Affair cast members. She was born on March 11, 1958, in Lafayette, Indiana and was enrolled in dance class at the age of 2 by her mother. The family moved to California where her parents were divorced and she lived with her mother. At the age of 6, she was brought to a commercial audition, scored the part and was on her way, which led to Family Affair. She became a major television personality during that show, made numerous public appearances and grew more and more frustrated by the fact that nobody would let her act her own age. She was the perennial 9 or 10-year-old even as she was starting to enter adolescence.

Tragic Death

When the show was over, she considered the idea of continuing to act, but found that producers and casting agents just couldn’t see beyond her Buffy persona. Frustrated, she gave up that line of work and tried to be a normal teenager and attend high school. Sadly, she never could fit in. She didn’t know how to. Falling in with a bad crowd, Anissa became hooked on drugs and on August 28, 1976 — at the age of 18 — died of a drug overdose, which the coroner described as one of the most severe he’d ever seen.

For much more on Anissa, please visit our in depth profile of her.

Brian Keith (William Sean Roger “Uncle Bill” Davis)

Like Fred MacMurray with My Three Sons, Brian came to television in the midst of a thriving movie career and the only way producer Don Fedderson was able to lure him in was to offer a similar deal: All of Brian’s scenes from the different episodes of a season would be shot in a pair of 30-day blocks, during which he would interact with the rest of the cast and guest stars. Then they would have to shoot all of the surrounding scenes. In some ways it sounds like a nightmare, but Fedderson had already worked out the kinks with MacMurray.

Born in a Family of Actors

He was born Robert Alba Keith on November 14, 1921, in Bayonne, New Jersey to parents Robert Keith and Helena Shipman, who were both actors as well. Describes the Hollywood blog myromancewithmovies, “He was the type of baby you hear of sleeping in a dresser drawer while his parents were on stage. They divorced when he was four and he was largely raised by his grandmother in New York. He credited her for giving him his love of reading. Broadway actress Peg Entwistle became his stepmother although she is not as famous for that fact as she is for killing herself by jumping off the ‘H’ of the Hollywood sign [in 1932].”

Broadway Debut

Following high school graduation, Brian became a part of the Marines from 1942 to 1945, serving as an air gunner during World War II. Following the war, he began pursuing stage roles, making his Broadway debut in 1948’s Mister Roberts, followed in 1951 by both Darkness at Noon and Out West of Eighth. Appearances on various television anthologies were next, among them Tales of Tomorrow, The United States Steel Hour and Robert Montgomery Presents. Then there were such films as Arrowhead (1953), Alaska Seas (1954), The Violent Men (1955), Storm Center (1956) and Dino (1957). It was around this time that he also found that he could pretty effortlessly shift back and forth between television and movies, which was not something every actor could do — or, rather, would be “allowed” to do. Westerns were a particular favorite.

Hits and Misses

His first TV series was Crusader, which aired between 1955 and 1956 for 52 episodes. In it, he plays freelance journalist Matt Anders, whose mother’s death in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II compels him to battle injustices around the world at the height of the Cold War. This was a black and white half-hour series. His second was 1960’s The Westerner, playing cowboy and drifter Dave Blasingame who’s just trying to get through life in the Old West and save enough money to buy his own ranch.

While some of his films were hits and some misses, there’s no denying the success of the 1961 Disney film The Parent Trap, which co-starred Maureen O’Hara, who would become a lifelong friend. Additionally, they would co-star together in 1961’s critically acclaimed Western, The Deadly Companions. The latter not withstanding, he was always grateful to Disney for taking a chance on him. “If it wasn’t for Disney,” he reflected in 1964, “I’d still be wearing a gun on my hip.”

Other Roles

Family Affair ran from 1966 to 1971, during which Brian continued to enjoy big screen success in movies like Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), co-starring with Doris Day in With Six You Get Eggroll (1968), Krakatoa: East of Java (1968), Gaily, Gaily (1969), Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? (1970) and The Mackenzie Break (1970). In between movie gigs he moved to Hawaii and began looking for another series, which took the form of The Little People (later retitled The Brian Keith Show), which saw him as a pediatrician working out of a free clinic in Hawaii. That show was on the air between 1972 and 1974.

Final Film

The six-part miniseries The Zoo Gang made its debut in 1974, with Brian playing one of a group of former resistance fighters in the French underground from World War II and an event that brings them all together again. The following season he tried playing Ross Macdonald’s private detective Lew Archer in the series Archer, but that only lasted six episodes before it was canceled. Movies on the big and small screen always seemed to be there for him, though in 1983 he returned to weekly television in the series Hardcastle and McCormick, playing retired judge Milton C. Hardcastle, who works with an ex-con (Daniel Hugh Kelly’s Mark McCormick) to make sure justice is served. That show had a five-season run, after which he made a number of guest star appearances on different shows.  His final film role was in 1997’s Rough Riders, in which he played President William McKinley; and on television it was a 1996 episode of Chuck Norris’ Walker, Texas Ranger.

His Death

Brian was married three times and has seven children. On June 24, 1997, he was discovered dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 75. Different circumstances led him to this decision: he was suffering from lung cancer and emphysema along with depression, there were mounting financial difficulties, he was seriously impacted by the death of his Family Affair costar Anissa Jones and his own daughter, Daisy, had committed suicide two months earlier. Sadly, he apparently found no other way to get away from the physical and emotional pain.

Johnny Whitaker (Jonathan Joshua “Jody” Patterson Davis)

One-half of the Davis twins was born John Orson Whitaker Jr. on December 13, 1959 in Van Nuys, California. His first “acting” opportunity came in a TV commercial for a used car dealer, and from there did a number of other ads, including some for Mattel Toymakers. In 1965 Johnny played the character Scotty Baldwin in the daytime soap opera General Hospital, followed the next year by the feature film The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (which is actually where he met Brian Keith for the first time). During the run of Family Affair, he appeared on some other shows as well, including Bewitched and The Virginian.

Private Life

Johnny followed the series with a two-part Gunsmoke storyline and then starred in several Disney movies, Snowball Express, The Biscuit Eater and Napoleon and Samantha (all 1972) and The Magic Pony (1977). In 1973 he was featured on the Sid and Marty Krofft series for Saturday mornings, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. His biggest movie, however, was 1973’s Tom Sawyer. As he got older, he worked as a computer consultant at CBS, joined his sister in her talent agency, Whitaker Entertainment; in 2012 co-produced and co-hosted talk radio series The Dr. Zod and Johnny Show and, in 2018, guest starred on an Amazon reboot of Sigmund.

In his private life, he was married to Symbria Wright from 1984 to 1988. He struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and only cleaned up his act when his family threatened to cut him out of their lives. He reportedly has been clean ever since and became a certified drug counselor.