Joyce Jameson

Biography

Well-endowed, attractive Joyce Jameson was typecast as 'broads', 'dames' and dizzy blondes - somewhat in the vein of Barbara Nichols. In real life, she was said to have been the antithesis of her screen personae, a graduate in theatre arts from UCLA, highly intelligent and well-read. Joyce began acting in films from 1951, after being 'spotted' at the small Cabaret Club by Steve Allen. At that time, she was already a seasoned performer on stage in musical revue, featured playing multiple parts in shows staged by her then-husband and mentor, Billy Barnes, initially at the Cabaret Club, then at the Las Palmas Theatre in Hollywood, and finally on Broadway. After several small supporting bits on the big screen and the odd ghost-written TV script, Joyce's career gained momentum from the late 1950's. She was seen in better productions, such as Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960). Adept at dialects and mimicry, Joyce also made a name for herself on The Jack Paar Tonight Show (1957) with a ventriloquist act, featuring her 'alter ego', an imaginary dummy unsurprisingly named 'Marilyn' (the idea of being subsumed by this 'other personality', Joyce was said to have derived from the British horror classic Dead of Night (1945)). Reputedly still more uproarious, were her biting impersonations of Judy Garland, Grace Kelly, and, above all, Marlene Dietrich. Joyce is most fondly remembered for the first of two 'cult' Gothic horrors she made for Roger Corman, loosely based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Tales of Terror (1962), finds her (in story number two, 'The Black Cat') as perpetually inebriated Peter Lorre's philandering wife Annabel, who suffers the ignominious fate of being entombed alive in a wine cellar, alongside paramour Vincent Price. Her performance on the way to that…