Joyce Jameson

Joyce Jameson

actress, soundtrack

Joyce Jameson was born on Sep 26, 1927 in USA. Joyce Jameson's big-screen debut came with Show Boat directed by George Sidney in 1951. Joyce Jameson is known for The Outlaw Josey Wales directed by Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood stars as Josey Wales and Chief Dan George as Lone Watie. The upcoming new movie Joyce Jameson plays is Hardbodies which will be released on May 04, 1984.

Well-endowed, attractive Joyce Jameson was typecast as 'broads', 'dames' and dizzy blondes - somewhat in the vein of Barbara Nichols. In real life, she was said to have been the antithesis of her screen personae, a graduate in theatre arts from UCLA, highly intelligent and well-read. Joyce began acting in films from 1951, after being 'spotted' at the small Cabaret Club by Steve Allen. At that time, she was already a seasoned performer on stage in musical revue, featured playing multiple parts in shows staged by her then-husband and mentor, Billy Barnes, initially at the Cabaret Club, then at the Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood, and finally on Broadway.After several small supporting bits on the big screen and the odd ghost-written TV script, Joyce's career gained momentum from the late 1950's. She was seen in better productions, such as Billy Wilder's La garçonnière (1960). Adept at dialects and mimicry, Joyce also made a name for herself on Tonight Starring Jack Paar (1957) with a ventriloquist act, featuring her 'alter ego', an imaginary dummy unsurprisingly named 'Marilyn' (the idea of being subsumed by this 'other personality', Joyce was said to have derived from the British horror classic Au coeur de la nuit (1945)). Reputedly still more uproarious, were her biting impersonations of Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, and, above all, Marlene Dietrich.Joyce is most fondly remembered for the first of two 'cult' Gothic horrors she made for Roger Corman, loosely based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. L'empire de la terreur (1962), finds her (in story number two, 'The Black Cat') as perpetually inebriated Peter Lorre's philandering wife Annabel, who suffers the ignominious fate of being entombed alive in a wine cellar, alongside paramour Vincent Price. Her performance on the way to that demise - at once funny and tragic - amply demonstrated her ability to hold her own in a leading role opposite such dominant personalities as Lorre and Price. She was quite good, too (and certainly very decorative) in her second outing for Corman, La Comédie de la terreur (1963) albeit in a more typical role as decrepit Boris Karloff's ditzy daughter, Amaryllis Trumbull.On television, Joyce had a recurring spot on The Andy Griffith Show (1960) and guested in many classic series, including westerns and science fiction, though her forte was almost certainly comedy. Unable to escape her typecasting, she rarely got the roles her acting talent undoubtedly merited, commenting with justifiable bitterness: "Everyone expects to cast me as the dumb or victimized blonde. After they interview me, I can just hear them say, 'Hey! She's intelligent, but what do you do with it?'" (The Pittsburgh Press, July 27,1958).

  • Birthday

    Sep 26, 1927
  • Place of Birth

    Chicago, Illinois, USA

Known For

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