Kasey Rogers

Life and career

Rogers was born Josie Imogene Rogers in Morehouse, Missouri, the daughter of Ina Mae (Mocabee) and Eben E. Rogers. She moved with her family to California at the age of two. As a child, her prowess at the game of baseball led her friends to nickname her Casey (after the famous poem "Casey at the Bat"). While under contract to Paramount, she used the stage name Laura Elliot. In 1955, she began working with a press agent in Hollywood, Walter Winslow Lewis III (aka "Bud"). It was Bud who suggested that she use the nickname with her maiden name and changed the "C" to a "K". They later married and had four children.

Rogers began work under the names Laura Elliott and Laura Elliot for Paramount Pictures. She appeared in movies such as Special Agent, Samson and Delilah, Silver City, Paid in Full, Two Lost Worlds, and, in perhaps her best-known film role, Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train, playing Miriam, the scheming, adulterous wife of Guy Haines (Farley Granger).

In the mid-1950s, Rogers began working on television. She guest-starred on various series, such as Stage 7, The Restless Gun, the Lone Ranger, Maverick, Yancy Derringer, Perry Mason, as Francie Keene in the Wanted: Dead or Alive episode "Railroaded", and many other programs. In 1964 she landed a starring role on Peyton Place, portraying the character Julie Anderson, the mother of Betty Anderson (Barbara Parkins). She left the series in 1966 to replace Irene Vernon in the role of Louise Tate on Bewitched. In 1972, she performed as Louise Tate for the final time in the episode "Serena's Youth Pill". She then retired from acting, appearing in only a few guest television spots and making appearances on the Bewitched edition of E! True Hollywood Story.

Twice-married and the mother of four (and a grandmother), Rogers had in recent years turned her talents to writing and development, including a proposed new television series, Son of a Witch.

Death

After battling throat cancer for many years, Rogers went into cardiac arrest. She then suffered a stroke, and died in Los Angeles, California, on July 6, 2006, aged 80.

Other achievements

In the 1970s, she became involved with motorcycles after her son began riding and then racing at the age of 9. Rogers became involved in the world of motocross racing. She worked closely with the AMA and established PURR ("PowderPuffs Unlimited Riders and Racers"), an association that brought women into the male-dominated sport, in 1974. PURR would later evolve into what is now the Women's Pro-Class division.

Books

Rogers wrote five books with Mark Wood. The first was The Bewitched Cookbook: Magic in the Kitchen (1996), a cookbook based on the television series Bewitched with the foreword written by Rogers' co-star and friend Sandra Gould. Her other books are Halloween Crafts: Eerily Elegant Décor (2001), Character Wreaths: Holiday Projects for Year 'Round Decor (2002), Decorating for Christmas (2003), and Create a Bewitched Falloween: 55 Projects for Decorating and Entertaining (2003). Rogers and Gould filmed an unaired pilot for a proposed how-to craft series, Hands on Holidays. The pilot was released on DVD in 2006.

In 2013, Bewitched and Beyond: The Fan Who Came to Dinner by Mark Wood (with Eddie Lucas) was published by BearManor Media, a book that recounts the friendship of Wood and Rogers. The title of Charles Tranberg's biography of Agnes Moorehead, I Love the Illusion, derives from Rogers' recounting how Moorehead used this sentence when she was once asked about acting.