Name Kathleen Crowley | Role Actress | |
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Full Name Betty Jane Kathleen Crowley Born December 26, 1930 (age 93) New Jersey, US ( 1930-12-26 ) Movies Target Earth, Westward Ho the Wagons!, Curse of the Undead, Downhill Racer, Female Jungle Similar People Pat Crowley, William Beaudine, Ray Nazarro, Bruno Vesota, Robert G Springsteen | ||
KATHLEEN CROWLEY TRIBUTE
Betty Jane Kathleen Crowley (born December 26, 1930) is an American actress who was crowned Miss New Jersey in 1949 and hence a contestant for Miss America that same year (she finished sixth).
As an actress, she specialized in being phenomenally seductive in films and television series. Most well known for playing a variety of sirens on the ABC/Warner Brothers series, Maverick (1957) opposite James Garner, Jack Kelly, and Roger Moore, she appears in eight episodes, a series record for leading ladies:
In his 2012 autobiography, The Garner Files (p. 62), James Garner cited Crowley as the leading lady from the series that he most vividly remembers after more than a half century:
Crowley made eighty-one television appearances and was cast in twenty movies between 1951 and 1970. One of her last movie roles was in Downhill Racer with Robert Redford. She made three guest appearances on Perry Mason, including the role of defendant and title character Marylin Clark in the 1958 episode, "The Case of the Lonely Heiress." Many of her films were low-budget science fiction and horror movies, but she seemed to appear in practically every narrative television series produced in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Her television credits include Crossroads, Bourbon Street Beat, Surfside 6, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Bat Masterson with Gene Barry, The Americans. Bonanza, Colt .45, Bronco, Branded with Chuck Connors, Redigo, My Three Sons with Fred MacMurray, The Donna Reed Show, Checkmate with Sebastian Cabot, Route 66, Thriller, Batman (episodes 21 and 22) with Adam West, Disneyland, Family Affair, Rawhide with Clint Eastwood, The High Chaparral and The Lone Ranger (episode 145). She also appeared in episodes of Cheyenne, in particular "Town of Fear" in 1957. She also made an appearance on the TV series The Virginian.
Crowley was frequently confused with Patricia "Pat" Crowley, an actress who appeared as a leading lady in different episodes of many of the same television series but was no relation. The two Crowleys never worked together. Fess Parker noted in his Archive of American Television interview that there were two actresses named Crowley whom everyone was always mixing up, one tall (Pat) and one short (Kathleen), and that he was paired for one project, despite being six and half feet tall, with the shorter Crowley.
In the Philip Roth novel American Pastoral, the protagonist marries Miss New Jersey 1949. The character in the book is named Dawn Dwyer and has few similarities to Crowley's post-Miss New Jersey life.