Right: Charlene Tilton in Nashville photographed for PEOPLE in February; Left: Tilton on Dallas in 1978.Photo: John Shearer; CBS Photo Archive/Getty
With her wide smile, Tilton still exudes effervescent Lucy Ewing charm, even without the voluminous golden locks that were her trademark as the iconic ’80s darling onDallas. But dressed in a green chenille sweater, skinny jeans and ankle boots that boost her petite 5' 1 1/2 inch frame, the 64-year-old actress is now more stylish grandma (her grandkids call her “Glamma” AKA, Glamorous Grandma) than blonde bombshell—and that’s just the way she wants it. “OnDallas, it was such a whirlwind,” she says. “The older I get, the more I’ve learned to be present in the day-to-day. I’m very content.”
Tilton (in red) with the Dallas cast in 1979.Everett
After Katherine was institutionalized when her daughter was 5, Tilton shuffled between relatives and foster homes. In one home, “I remember the kids saying, ‘When is she going to go?’ and the parents said, ‘We’re trying to send her off but we can’t get anyone to take her.’ I thought, ‘I’m never going to depend on anybody to take care of me.'”
When Tilton was almost 8 her mother was released, and they moved back to California. But despite medication (“There were always a lot of pill bottles around”), her mom continued to struggle. Once when she chaperoned one of Tilton’s junior high dances, “she started fighting with herself, having a full-on conversation,” Tilton recalls. “I wanted to die of embarrassment.” Their apartment was often filthy and her mother refused to urinate in anything other than Tupperware containers: “That went on for years. I could never bring friends over.”
Still a teen when she landed the part as J.R. Ewing’s scheming niece in 1978, Tilton was already living on her own in L.A. after having moved out of her mother’s squalid apartment. “A rat crawled across me one night and I went, ‘I can’t live like this.'”
Her own search for love led to her first marriage, at the age of 23 to country singerJohnny Lee,12 years her senior, which lasted only two years. “The marriage was a disaster in the making,” she says. “But we had a beautiful daughter.” Cherish, born in 1982, “went with me everywhere,” Tilton says. “I was a helicopter mom.”
After her mother died in 2001, she started dating cinematographer Cheddy Hart and taking on some small roles. But in 2009, when the two were engaged, he died suddenly of heart failure, plunging her into a dark period. “I just sat on the couch drinking and smoking cigarettes,” she says. A friend’s involvement with Actors for Autism inspired her to volunteer. “I fell in love with the students,” she says. “To get out of your own depression or grief, you go help somebody.”
Tilton with her daughter, Cherish Lee, and grandsons in December 2021.Courtesy Charlene Tilton
She has also made peace with her childhood after discovering about two years ago through a DNA test that she has three half-siblings who, like her, had never met their biological father. When they finally tracked him down, they learned he’d died six months earlier at the age of 93. Still, “I don’t carry a chip on my shoulder. I don’t get into self-pity. I see the bright side of things, and that’s served me well during tumultuous times.”
source: people.com
