Los Angeles ? Barbara Billingsley, who played June Cleaver, the quintessential 1950s sitcom mom on “Leave It to Beaver,” and later did a memorable send-up of her white-bread image playing the “jive-talking” passenger in the hit comedy “Airplane!” has died. She was 94.

Billingsley, who played small parts in B movies and appeared on television before achieving sitcom immortality, died Saturday at her home in Santa Monica of the rheumatoid disorder polymyalgia, said publicist Judy Twersky.

“Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver,” Billingsley’s June would say to her TV husband, played by Hugh Beaumont, on “Leave It to Beaver.”

The gentle-humored series, which viewed life from a kid’s point of view and ran from 1957 to 1963 — on CBS before moving to ABC in the fall of ’58 — featured Jerry Mathers as Theodore “Beaver” Cleaver and Tony Dow as his older brother, Wally.

As June Cleaver, Billingsley was the personification of an Eisenhower-era stay-at-home mom — at least one residing in fictional Mayfield, U.S.A.: a mild-mannered, perfectly coiffed housewife who typically wore dresses, high heels and a strand of white pearls even while vacuuming or baking cookies for her boys.

“She was the ideal mother,” Billingsley said of her character in 1997 in TV Guide. “Some people think she was weakish, but I don’t. She was the love in that family. She set a good example for what a wife could be. I had two boys at home when I did the show. I think the character became kind of like me and vice versa. I’ve never known where one started and where one stopped.”

As for the idealized TV family on “Leave It to Beaver,” which continues in reruns on cable more than half a century after its debut, Billingsley had her own explanation for the Cleavers’ enduring appeal.

“I think everybody would like a family like that. Wouldn’t it be nice if you came home from school and there was Mom standing there with her little apron and cookies waiting?” she told TV Guide.

As for her trademark white-pearl necklace, Billingsley said in 2003 in The Times that she wore it “because I have a big hollow in my neck” and the necklace covered the spot perfectly.

“So no matter what I was doing — cleaning, cooking or answering the phone — I had those darn pearls on,” she said. And there was a practical reason she wore high heels on the show.

“In the beginning of the series I wore flat shoes, but then Wally and the Beaver began to get taller,” she said. “The producers wanted me to be as tall or taller than the kids.”