JOAN O’BRIEN

(14 February 1936 - 5 May 2025)

The American actress and singer Joan O’Brien, who has died from Alzheimer’s at the age of 89, was never a big star in films or music but one of many performers in the 1950s and ‘60s who were always around, topping up their careers on television when the movies dried up. She made just ten films between 1958 and 1964, but kept her acting career in check by some forty TV appearances, so had a modest working life like so many others of the time. She was born Joan Marie O’Brien in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to David and Rita O’Brien and, when she was still a child the family moved to California where Joan began dance classes aged eight. She graduated from high school in Ontario, California, but before that had begun singing in the Country music TV show Hometown Jamboree at just thirteen. This led her to regular spots on The Bob Crosby Show from 1954. Then she worked with bandleader Lawrence Welk and continued her singing career until she began to be cast in TV drama series.

O’Brien’s first dramatic role was in M Squad in 1958, a Chicago crime series produced by the actor Lee Marvin who also appeared in it as detective Frank Ballinger. In the same year O’Brien made her first film, Handle With Care for MGM, with Dean Jones and Thomas Mitchell in a plot about a law school and a mock trial. The TV parts kept coming (Riverboat, Man Without a Gun, Bat Masterson and other Westerns including Wagon Train, Cheyenne, The Westerner, The Deputy, with Henry Fonda, as well as the dramas Perry Mason, Bus Stop, etc). She was also in The Man from Uncle with Robert Vaughn, who later cast her as Ophelia in his production of Hamlet at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.

For the cinema she was in Blake Edwards’s naval comedy Operation Petticoat (1959) with Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, and then played opposite John Wayne in his own directed version of The Alamo (1960) with Richard Widmark and Laurence Harvey. She was with Wayne again in Michael Curtiz’s The Comancheros (1961) co-starring Stuart Whitman and Lee Marvin and did an Audie Murphy Western, Six Black Horses in 1962. In the same year she appeared in three other films, Samar, a Spanish historical drama, with George Montgomery and Gilbert Roland; Frank Tashlin’s It’s Only Money, a Jerry Lewis comedy, and We Joined the Navy, Wendy Toye’s British comedy with Kenneth More, Lloyd Nolan and John Le Mesurier. O’Brien’s film career was winding down with the part of Elvis Presley’s girlfriend in It Happened at the World’s Fair in 1963 and allegedly it was a real-life romance too. O’Brien’s last film was Get Yourself a College Girl, a beach party comedy also known as The Swingin’ Set, in 1964. After that she resumed her singing career with the Harry James Band.

Joan O’Brien was first married to actor-composer Billy Strange in 1954 and they had one child. She then married the producer-director John F. Meyers and they too had a child. Her third husband was Dr Harvey Allen Godorov, and her fourth the animator and art director Dino Kotopoulis. All four marriages ended in divorce. Her last husband was Lt. Col. Malcolm Bernard Campbell and they were married from 1979 until his death in 2004.

MICHAEL DARVELL