Patricia Windrow

Biography

Patricia Windrow was born on September 12, 1921 in St. John's Wood, London, England to Marjorie Desborough and Stellan Sven Windrow (the Chicagoan who was contracted for the role of Tarzan of the Apes in the movie by Scott Sidney, and had begun shooting it when he was drafted into the US Armed Forces during the First World War: Clips of him swinging in the trees can still be seen in the film, which only lists Elmo Lincoln as playing Tarzan). When she was one year old, the family moved to Le Vésinet within Paris, France; then in 1939 they moved to the New York City/Long Island area where Pat eventually settled and lived from the late 1940s until 1989 when she moved with her third husband to the Washington, D.C. area and then to northern Virginia, where she spent the rest of her life. Though known mostly as an artist of landscapes and huge flowers and other objects, in her youth she was an actress, known for the French film Le Petit Roi (1933), and also "Lydia" starring Merle Oberon, in which she had a small speaking role. She was married first to Cuban actor José Pérez, with whom she had a son Kenneth Theodore Perez, but soon divorced him and eventually married pianist and American arts advocate Howard Klein (1931-2021), who as Director for Arts at The Rockefeller Foundation helped start Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. She died holding Howard's hand on March 5, 2013 in Winchester, Virginia, USA. In 1979, in Suffolk County, NY, Patricia created a local cable TV instructional show called The Cable Easel, which won a cable ACE award for best informational/demonstrational series from the National Federation of Local Cable Programmers, and ran until 1994. Her sons by Howard, Adam C J Klein and Lawrence (Moondi) Klein, became performers in the opera and Bluegrass worlds, respectively.