Actor Pat Crowley, whose career spanned stage, film, and television for more than six decades, died Sunday in Los Angeles at age 91.
Her son, Jon Hookstratten, an executive vice president at Sony Pictures, announced the news, saying she died of natural causes, according to Deadline. Crowley would have turned 92 on Tuesday.
Born Sept. 17, 1933, in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, Crowley studied at New York’s High School of Performing Arts before working in modeling and theater. She entered Hollywood in the early 1950s and received the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year in 1954 following performances in “Forever Female,” opposite Ginger Rogers and William Holden, and “Money from Home,” with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
Her film credits during the 1950s and 1960s included “Red Garters,” “The Square Jungle,” and Douglas Sirk’s “There’s Always Tomorrow,” where she appeared alongside Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.
Crowley built a strong television presence through guest roles in shows such as “Gunsmoke,” “Bonanza,” “The Untouchables,” “Rawhide,” and “Maverick.” In 1963, she co-starred with Burgess Meredith in “Printer’s Devil,” an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”
She became best known for her role in the NBC sitcom “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies,” from 1965-1967. As Joan Nash, a newspaper columnist and mother, Crowley played one of TV’s first characters to challenge the traditional housewife role. While the series lasted only two seasons, it found a following in syndication during the 1970s.
“It was a great role for me, because she was very independent, very feisty … having fun raising her kids, which I sort of did. I loved having fun with the kids when they were that age, and so I think we brought that to the show,” Crowley said later in an interview for The Pioneers of Television. “I liked the fact that she worked, I liked the fact that her career was important. She was kind of juggling it all. I liked the fact that — up to then, the women were wonderful, but they all wear the skirts, and they all … just didn’t seem to have a lot of dimension. These, we always had a message in the show. But I did like the idea that she was able to juggle everything, because that’s what I was trying to do too.”
Her later television work included appearances on “Columbo,” “Hawaii Five-0,” “The Rockford Files,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Love Boat,” “Hotel,” “Murder, She Wrote,” “Friends,” “Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Melrose Place,” “Frasier,” and “Charmed.” She also had a lengthy career in daytime drama, portraying Mary Scanlon in more than 250 episodes of “Port Charles” and appearing in “Generations,” “The Bold and the Beautiful,” “General Hospital,” and “Falcon Crest.”
Crowley’s final screen role was in the 2012 independent film “Mont Reve.”
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