Joan Blondell was most active in film during the 1930s and early 1940s, and during that time co-starred with Glenda Farrell, a colleague and close friend, in nine films.
33 Facts About Joan Blondell
2.
Joan Blondell was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The Blue Veil.
3.
Joan Blondell was featured in two more films, the blockbuster musical Grease and Franco Zeffirelli's The Champ, which was released shortly before her death from leukemia.
4.
Joan Blondell's father, Levi Bluestein, a vaudeville comedian known as Ed Blondell, was born in Poland to a Jewish family in 1866.
5.
Joan Blondell toured for many years starring in Blondell and Fennessy's stage version of The Katzenjammer Kids.
6.
Joan Blondell's mother was Catherine Caine, born in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York on April 13,1884, to Irish-American parents.
7.
Joan Blondell's cradle was a property trunk as her parents moved from place to place.
8.
Joan Blondell made her first appearance on stage at the age of four months when she was carried on in a cradle as the daughter of Peggy Astaire in The Greatest Love.
9.
Joan Blondell's family comprised a vaudeville troupe, the Bouncing Blondells.
10.
Joan Blondell had spent a year in Honolulu and six years in Australia and had seen much of the world by the time her family stopped touring and settled in Dallas, Texas when she was a teenager.
11.
Joan Blondell attended Santa Monica High School, where she acted in school plays and edited the school yearbook.
12.
Joan Blondell began to appear in short subjects and was named as one of the WAMPAS Baby Stars in 1931.
13.
Joan Blondell was paired several more times with James Cagney in films, including The Public Enemy and Footlight Parade, and was one-half of a gold-digging duo with Glenda Farrell in nine films.
14.
In 1943, Joan Blondell returned to Broadway as the star of Mike Todd's short-lived production of The Naked Genius, a comedy written by Gypsy Rose Lee.
15.
Joan Blondell was well received in her later films, despite being relegated to character and supporting roles after 1945, when she was billed below the title for the first time in 14 years in Adventure, which starred Clark Gable and Greer Garson.
16.
Joan Blondell was featured prominently in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Nightmare Alley.
17.
Joan Blondell later reprised her role of Aunt Sissy in the musical version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn for the national tour and played the nagging mother, Mae Peterson, in the national tour of Bye Bye Birdie.
18.
Joan Blondell received considerable acclaim for her performance as Lady Fingers in Norman Jewison's The Cincinnati Kid, garnering a Golden Globe nomination and National Board of Review win for Best Supporting Actress.
19.
Joan Blondell guest-starred in various television programs, including three 1963 episodes as the character Aunt Win in the CBS sitcom The Real McCoys, starring Walter Brennan and Richard Crenna.
20.
Also in 1963, Joan Blondell was cast as the widowed Lucy Tutaine in the episode, "The Train and Lucy Tutaine", on the syndicated anthology series, Death Valley Days, hosted by Stanley Andrews.
21.
Joan Blondell replaced Bea Benaderet, who was ill, for one episode on the CBS series Petticoat Junction.
22.
In that installment, Joan Blondell played FloraBelle Campbell, a lady visitor to Hooterville, who had once dated Uncle Joe and Sam Drucker.
23.
That same year, Joan Blondell co-starred in all 52 episodes of the ABC Western series Here Come the Brides, set in the Pacific Northwest of the 19th century.
24.
Joan Blondell's co-stars included singer Bobby Sherman and actor-singer David Soul.
25.
Joan Blondell received two consecutive Emmy nominations for outstanding continued performance by an actress in a dramatic series for her role as Lottie Hatfield.
26.
Joan Blondell's students worked in Banyon's office, providing fresh faces for the show weekly.
27.
Joan Blondell has a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for her contributions to the film industry.
28.
Joan Blondell was married three times, first to cinematographer George Barnes in a private wedding ceremony on January 4,1933, at the First Presbyterian Church in Phoenix, Arizona.
29.
Joan Blondell's marriage to Todd was an emotional and financial disaster that ended in divorce in 1950.
30.
Joan Blondell once accused him of holding her outside a hotel window by her ankles.
31.
Joan Blondell was a heavy spender who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling and went through a controversial bankruptcy during their marriage.
32.
Joan Blondell died of leukemia in Santa Monica, California, on Christmas Day, 1979, with her children and her sister at her bedside.
33.
Joan Blondell was cremated and her ashes interred in a columbarium at the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.