Betty Harford, who played Mrs. Nottingham, John Housemans secretary, on The Paper Chase and Mrs. Gunnerson, the Carrington family cook, on Dynasty, has died. She was 98.

Harford died Nov. 2 in Santa Barbara, her friend Wendy Mitchell told The Hollywood Reporter.

On the big screen, Harford cared for Sandra Dees Rosalie Stocker in The Wild and the Innocent (1959) and portrayed the opportunistic older sister of Natalie Woods unstable title character in Inside Daisy Clover (1965), the melodrama directed by Robert Mulligan. Harford had acted in Housemans UCLA Theatre Group in the 1960s and played a nurse for director James Bridges in the Richard Thomas-starring 1977 film September 30, 1955 thats the day James Dean died in a car crash when she was cast as the secretary for law school professor Charles W. Kingsfield (Houseman) on the CBS drama The Paper Chase.

She showed up as the prickly but efficient Mrs. Nottingham on 41 episodes of the series, which ran for one season (1978-79) on CBS and three more (1983-86) on Showtime. (The show, developed by Bridges, was based on a 1971 novel by John Jay Osborn Jr. and the Bridges-helmed 1973 Fox film that won Houseman an Academy Award.)

Meanwhile, Harford had started another subservient role in 1981 on ABCs Dynasty, and she would recur as Hilda Gunnerson working for John Forsythes Blake Carrington on 34 episodes of the primetime soap during its first eight seasons (1981-87). She then came back for the 1991 reunion miniseries.

Born in New York City on Jan. 28, 1927, Harford acted in the 1950s on the radio on Gunsmoke and the docudrama series Crime Classics, appeared on the TV anthology shows Fireside Theatre, Luv Video Theatre and Alfred Hitchcock Presents and provided the voice of Gumba (mother of Gumby, wife of Gumbo) on a cartoon.

Later, she was on the TV version of Gunsmoke as well as on Richard Diamond, Private Detective, The Twilight Zone (on the 1962 Richard Long-starring Person or Persons Unknown episode) and a 1963 installment of The Great Adventure that was written by Bridges.

As a member of the Westwood-based UCLA Theatre Group launched in 1959 by Houseman, Eva Marie Saint, Paul Newman, Robert Ryan and others Harford acted alongside the likes of Nina Foch, Inga Swenson and Pippa Scott.

Her rsum also included roles on TVs Dr. Kildare, The Big Valley, Room 222 and Mrs. Columbo and bit parts in such films as Spartacus (1960), Signpost to Murder (1964), Win, Place or Steal (1974) and the Bridges-directed The China Syndrome (1979).

She was married to sculptor Oliver Andrews (he died at age 53 while scuba diving off the coast of California in 1978) and to Hungarian actor Sndor Naszdy (he died at age 81 in 1996).

Survivors include her son, Chris, and her grandsons.