R.I.P. Carol Serling, the wife of Rod Serling who made a cameo in Twilight Zone: The Movie

By: Start TV Staff     Posted: January 15, 2020, 4:22PM    Tags: Obituaries

After serving in World War II, Rod Serling used the G.I. Bill to attend Antioch College in Yellow Spring, Ohio. It was the school his elder brother attended. In the fall of '46, Serling met a freshman named Carol Kramer. Two years later, the couple married.

Rod and Carol remained married until his death in 1975. In the subsequent 45 years, Carol Serling has become a caretaker of the Twilight Zone legacy. Most recently, she earned an executive producer credit in the Jordan Peele reboot of The Twilight Zone for the CBS All Access streaming service.

She consulted on Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) and served as a supervising producer for 1994's Twilight Zone: Rod Serling's Lost Classics. In the 1980s, Carol worked as a consulting editor and associate publisher for Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine.

In 1987, she sat down for an interview with Bob Rosenbaum that was published in Twilight Zone Magazine.

"I think Rod would be absolutely amazed that the interest is still there and that so many people remember his work," she said. She had recently appeared in the Fifth Dimension herself. In the fourth and final segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie, George Miller (Mad Max) directs a kinetic remake of "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" with John Lithgow in the William Shatner role.

The tale opens with Lithgow undergoing a panic attack in an airplane bathroom. When he exits the toilet, a concerned passenger stands up and asks the flight attendants if everything is okay. That was none other than Carol Serling herself, as seen above.

When Carol and Rod finished college at the dawn of the 1950s, the lovebirds moved to Cincinnati, where Rod wrote radio ads for Geritol. Carol worked to help support the two as Rod tried to break into writing. She worked until the birth of their first daughter, Jody. A second daughter, Anne, followed.

On January 13, Anne Serling announced that her mother had passed. Carol Serling was 91.