American dancer and variety show performer, she was an MGM contract dancer in her teens and became the third wife of silent-film comedian Buster Keaton at the age of 21. She is credited with rehabilitating her husband’s life and career. The two performed at the Cirque Medrano in Paris and on European tours in the 1950s; she also performed with him on The Buster Keaton Show in the early 1950s. After his death in 1966, she helped ensure Keaton’s legacy by giving many interviews to biographers, film historians, and journalists, sharing details from his personal life and career, and also attended film festivals and celebrations honouring Keaton. In her later years, she bred champion St. Bernard dogs, was a gag consultant for Hollywood filmmakers, and was an invited speaker at silent-film screenings.
In June 1998, Keaton donated more than 900 items of her husband’s personal memorabilia from 1938 to 1966 to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the urging of biographer Jeffrey Vance, who argued that these materials should be preserved in an archive rather than in the hands of private collectors or sold at auction.
In October 1998, Eleanor Keaton was hospitalized at the Motion Picture Relief Fund Hospital in Woodland Hills suffering from emphysema and lung cancer. She died on 19 October 1998, aged 80.
Link to Wikipedia biography