Iris Korn (1907–1982)

At a stage of life when many begin to slow down, Iris Korn moved to southern California to pursue a dream she had put off for more than thirty-five years. The realization of that dream—a life as a working actress—landed her on screen with such legendary entertainers as Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, and Burt Reynolds.

Iris Aileen Dobson was born in the Collietown community in rural Independence County, four miles west of Cushman (Independence County), on January 6, 1907. The middle child of five daughters born to David Ewing Dobson and Sarah Lou Ella Collie Dobson, she grew up on the family farm before the Dobsons relocated to Newark (Independence County) and eventually to Batesville (Independence County), where her parents bought a small bungalow across the street from Arkansas College (now Lyon College) to enhance their daughters’ educational opportunities. After winning the state individual debate championship as a senior at Batesville High, she excelled in Arkansas College’s theater program under the tutelage of professor Lois Ball, a leader of the Little Theatre movement in Arkansas. In 1928, Dobson won the award presented to the top actress at the National University Theatre Tournament at Northwestern University. Upon her graduation from Arkansas College in 1929, she put aside a potential career on stage to marry former classmate Thomas Korn.

When he lost his job at a Texas oil refinery during the depths of the Great Depression, the young couple settled in his hometown of Joplin, Missouri. Living in and around Joplin for more than three decades, Iris Korn raised two sons and a daughter, offered private acting and “expression” lessons for girls, and played a major role in the creation and operation of the Joplin Little Theatre. All the while, she served as the stabilizing force in an often-dysfunctional family challenged by Tom Korn’s undiagnosed mental health issues.

After her youngest child left for college in 1965, she made the decision—over Tom’s objections—to move to Los Angeles and pursue an acting career. She was fifty-eight. Within months, Iris appeared alongside veteran actor Alan Reed (the original voice of Fred Flintstone) in a comedy at the Stage Society Theater on Melrose Avenue. By the summer of 1967, she was playing the lead role in the Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Subject Was Roses at the Laguna Beach Playhouse.

Buoyed by her success on stage, she became an in-demand television character actor in the 1970s, appearing in more than forty episodes of a wide variety of programs, including such series as Barnaby Jones, The Waltons, Charlie’s Angels, The Incredible Hulk, and Taxi. She had a recurring role on Norman Lear’s satirical primetime soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and landed a spot in the main cast of Lear and Alex Haley’s short-lived historical drama Palmerstown, U.S.A. on CBS in 1980 and 1981. But she may be best remembered for her 1979 guest-starring role as the woman who marries the preacher on Little House on the Prairie. Korn also appeared in half a dozen movies, including White Lightning, filmed on location in Arkansas. She played the mother of Burt Reynolds’s character, Gator McClusky.

Diagnosed with leukemia in the mid-1970s, Korn continued to work until a few months before her death, making her final appearance in a stage production of Sam Shepard’s True West, with an up-and-coming Ed Harris playing one of her sons. She returned to Missouri shortly after that play’s run ended and died in a Springfield hospital on January 27, 1982. She is buried in Batesville’s Oaklawn Cemetery.

For additional information:
Blevins, Brooks. “It’s My Turn: The Three Acts of Iris Korn.” The New Territory 19 (Summer 2026): 50–59.

“Iris Korn.” Internet Movie Database. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0466363/ (accessed November 3, 2026).

Brooks Blevins
Lyon College