American character actress best known for playing the role of perennial spinster, Miss Jane Hathaway, on the CBS television series The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971). In 1967, she received an Emmy Award nomination for her role. Kulp was once described as television’s most homely girl or, as one reviewer put it, possessing the “face of a shriveled balloon, the figure of a string of spaghetti, and the voice of a bullfrog in mating season.” Others described her as tall and prim and praised her comedic skills.
In 1984, after working with the Democratic state committee in her home state of Pennsylvania “on a variety of projects” over a period of years, Kulp ran unopposed as the Democratic nominee for the United States House of Representatives from Pennsylvania’s 9th congressional district. As an opponent of the Republican incumbent Bud Shuster in a Republican-dominated district, Kulp was the decided underdog. Garnering 59,449 votes—just 33.6% of the ballots cast in the election—to Shuster’s 117,203 votes and 66.4%, she lost.
Kulp married Charles Malcolm Dacus on 1 April 1951 in Dade County, Florida; they divorced in 1961. After her retirement from acting and teaching, she moved first to a farm in Connecticut and later to Palm Springs, California, where she became involved in several charity organizations, including the Humane Society of the Desert, the Desert Theatre League, and United Cerebral Palsy. In 1989, Kulp gave an interview to author and homosexual activist Boze Hadleigh in which she indicated that she was a lesbian.
Kulp was diagnosed with cancer in 1990, for which she received chemotherapy. By 1991, the cancer had spread, and she died on 3 February 1991, aged 69, in Palm Desert, California.
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