Jean Joyce

Biography

Jean Joyce was born Eleanor Jean Shookey. Her father walked out and her mother, Florence Shookey, worked as a secretary in an oil company. Jean and her mother later moved to Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. She attended Roosevelt Junior high where she played in the school band. At the age of seventeen she joined the Adkar Associated Players theater troupe in Tulsa. In 1934 she moved to Hollywood and got a job dancing in a nightclub. The beautiful brunette made her film debut in the musical College Rhythm. Jean landed bit parts in numerous movies including Rhumba, The Girl Friend, and The Great Ziegfeld. Then she was chosen to be a dancer in the musical Swing Time starring Ginger Rogers. During filming choreographer Hermes Pan held a contest and she was named the "champion chorus girl of the 1936." When she wasn't working she enjoyed swimming and sleeping late. Her first marriage, to her high school sweetheart, had ended in divorce. She married director Abby Berlin in 1938. Jean was signed by Republic Pictures and appeared in the Westerns Outlaws Of Sonora and Riders Of The Frontier. On November 5, 1939 she got into a fight with her husband. She was so angry that she decided to commit suicide by swallowing arsenic laced ant paste. Tragically she died the next day, November 6, at the young age of twenty-three. Jean was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California. Her final film, Overland Mail,was released ten days after her death.