Joyce Jameson

Joyce Jameson

Joyce Jameson was a classic example of the professional "dumb blonde" with a diametrically opposite off-screen personality. Entering films as a chorus member in the 1951 version of Showboat, Jameson honed her musical comedy talents in several satirical revues staged by her onetime husband Billy Barnes. Intelligent, sensitive, and extremely well read, Jameson nonetheless found herself perpetually cast as an airhead or golddigger. In films, she was seen in such roles as a Marilyn Monroe wannabe in The Apartment (1960) and a call-girl who runs screaming from her room when she thinks Jack Lemmon is about to paint her body in Good Neighbor Sam (1963). One of her more unorthodox film assignments was as the vulgar, unfaithful wife of Peter Lorre in Roger Corman's Tales of Terror (1963), in which she and her paramour Vincent Price are walled up in Lorre's wine cellar. One year later, she was reteamed with Lorre and Price in the raucous A Comedy of Terrors (1963), where she was more typically cast as a nitwit. Her later films include The Outlaw Josie Wales (1976) and Hardbodies (1981). Joyce Jameson was a fixture of 1950s and 1960s TV, playing a variety of buxom "straight women" for such comedians as Steve Allen, Red Skelton and Danny Kaye. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide