cap by Tracy
Patricia Crowley is featured on the Season 4 DVD giving an audio guide to The Actress.Patricia Crowley was born on 17 September 1933 in Olyphant, Pennsylvania
Her father, Vincent, was a coal mining foreman. Her older sister Ann triggered Pat's interest in performing when, during Ann's appearance in a Chicago musical production, the ten-year-old Pat was given a walk-on part. Ann Crowley would go on to have a promising musical career appearing in such late 40s/early 50s N.Y. shows as "Carousel", "Oklahoma!" and "Paint Your Wagon".
By age 11, Patricia had become a photographer's model and attended New York's High School of Performing Arts. She won her first major TV part scarcely out of high school and seemed destined to become an important teen star as the bobbysoxer lead in the Saturday morning TV series "A Date with Judy" (1952), which was adapted from the highly popular radio series of the 1940s. When the series moved to prime time, however, another actress replaced her.
A glamourous actress throughout her long career.
An 1950 publicity shot of Patricia
and a more recent picture
After a number of early 1950s TV assignments, Pat was brought out to Hollywood to co-star with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis in one of the pair's typical slapstick outings Money from Home (1953). She then made Forever Female (1953) co-starring William Holden and Ginger Rogers. Pat made the most of her role and earned a Golden Globe for "best promising female newcomer". From there, she played the second female lead in the musical Red Garters (1954) starring Rosemary Clooney and Guy Mitchell.
Working mainly in dramatic TV showcases which were so popular in 1950’s, Pat continued in movie roles amongst her co stars was Tony Curtis in The Square Jungle and Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in There's Always Tomorrow (1956). Pat reunited with Martin & Lewis in their very last film Hollywood or Bust (1956) before the pair's professional breakup.
When her film career started to lose steam in the late 50s Pat found steadier work on TV and guested on many of the popular shows of the day using her drama and comedy skills which she used to great effect in The Actress.
It was in the sitcom that Pat achieved her biggest success when she was cast as "Joan Nash", the untraditional, harried wife/columnist of an English professor whose four precocious sons and huge sheep dog added greatly to the mayhem in "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" 1965, it was a role that made her a household name at the time.
Since then, Patricia has continued to maintain a strong visibility especially on TV, although she was not given the star-making opportunities like this again. Pat is best known to a later generation of viewers for her regular roles on daytime's "Generations" , "Port Charles" (1997) (1997-2003) and "The Bold and the Beautiful" (1987) (2005).
A guest on such sitcoms as "Frasier" (1993), "Roseanne" (1988) and "Friends" (1994), recurring roles on "Joe Forrester" (1975) (perfectly paired with Lloyd Bridges), "Dynasty" (1981) and "Beverly Hills, 90210" (1990) also showed Pat to good advantage. More recently, she has appeared in episodes of "The Closer" (2005) and "Cold Case" (2003).
In 1958 Patricia married Ed Hookstratten, a successful attorney for top entertainment and sports icons. They had a son, Jon, and a daughter, Ann, named after her sister. After their two-decade marriage ended, she went on to marry producer Andy Friendly in 1986.
Sources Wikipedia & imdb
