“We’re not petite as sweet Joan Leslie.” So sang The Andrews Sisters in the song “Corns for My Country” from the 1944 Warner Bros. musical Hollywood Canteen, whose all-star cast just happened to feature the 5’4″ Leslie as herself. The movie’s story may have fictionalized, but the real-life Joan also spent many an hour helping out at the WWII servicemen’s club, just part of the off-screen demeanor that helped give the actress–who passed away this week at 90–the reputation of being a “nice girl.” It was a reputation which, ironically, may have helped to shorten a promising film career that still contained a number of memorable roles.
Born Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel in January of 1925 in the Detroit suburb of Highland Park, she joined her older sisters in a musical vaudeville act, The Three Brodels, during the Depression and delighted audiences with impressions of Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Durante and other notables. When the siblings performed in New York in 1936, a talent scout saw the act and signed Joan to a six-month trial run with MGM. Her feature film debut came later that year in the Greta Garbo weeper Camille, as the little sister of Robert Taylor, but her speaking scenes were left on the editing room floor and she was uncredited. Once her MGM contract expired, Joan had unbilled bit parts in such pictures as Nancy Drew…Reporter and Love Affair until she was finally credited–as Joan Brodel–in 1939’s Winter Holiday. She was seen–briefly–the following year in Susan and God with Joan Crawford and in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent, and she was tapped as one of the “baby stars of 1940.”
Joan’s big break came in 1941 when she was signed by Warner Bros., who felt her name sounded too close to Joan Blondell and changed her surname to Leslie. The ability to cry on cue during a screen test helped the 16-year-old win the role of Velma, the mountain-dwelling handicapped girl who thaws the heart of gangster Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) in Howard Hawks’ gangster classic High Sierra. The duo were re-teamed later that year, with Leslie as the sister of carnival owner Bogie, for The Wagons Roll at Night. 1941 also saw her play Gracie, fiancée of WWI hero Alvin York (Gary Cooper), in the Oscar-winning biodrama Sergeant York. Interestingly, it was York’s insistence that his future wife be portrayed by a non-smoking actress which helped Leslie beat out, among others, Jane Russell for the part.
1942 saw Joan as the sister-in-law of embattled college professor Henry Fonda in the screen adaptation of James Thurber and Elliott Nugent’s academic stage comedy The Male Animal, followed by a co-starring turn as the performer-wife of entertainer George M. Cohan (James Cagney) in the patriotic crowd-please Yankee Doodle Dandy. By now Leslie was giving Teresa Wright a run for her money in the “innocent good girl” on-screen sweepstakes, and a change-of-pace role came in 1943’s The Hard Way, a musical/drama where Ida Lupino pushes sister Leslie into a marriage and stage career, only to watch as success turns her sibling into a pleasure-seeking party girl. That same year Leslie got the chance to act and dance opposite Fred Astaire in RKO’s The Sky’s the Limit. She also appeared in such morale-boosting musicals as This Is the Army, Thank Your Lucky Stars, the aforementioned Hollywood Canteen, and Where Do We Go from Here?
Leslie played a fictional love interest of real-life composer George Gershwin (Robert Alda) in 1945’s Rhapsody in Blue. The picture’s success led Warner Bros. to reunite the duo the following year in Cinderella Jones, but Joan was starting to feel stifled by the projects–Cinderella Jones, as well as Too Young to Know and Janie Gets Married, a pair of romance films with Robert Hutton–the studio was offering her, and she went to court to get out of her contact. Never one to take such challenges lying down, mogul Jack Warner is said to have pressured other studios not to hire the “troublesome” 21-year-old.
As a result, Joan wound up making two films for “B” producers Eagle-Lion. Along with 1947’s frontier actioner Northwest Stampede, there was also Repeat Performance the following year. This offbeat fantasy/mystery, a noir-flavored Groundhog Day, offered Leslie the chance to stretch her dramatic muscles as a stage actress who guns down abusive spouse Louis Hayward on New Year’s Eve, only to suddenly find herself back one year before the crime and trying to avoid the fateful–or is that fated?–encounter. In 1950 Joan was a homemaker whose naval officer husband (Robert Walker) takes over running the household when she’s laid up in the comedy The Skipper Surprised His Wife, and then was a publisher’s assistant who stands to lose her fiancé (Robert Ryan) to her boss’s manipulative niece (Joan Fontaine) in the All About Eve-style drama Born to Be Bad.
1950 also found Joan marrying obstetrician William Caldwell and giving birth to twin daughters the next year. Her ’50s film work included such westerns as Man in the Saddle (1951) with Randolph Scott, alongside Sterling Hayden in Hellgate (1952), and the Civil War-set actioner The Woman They Almost Lynched (1953); as the title heroine in the military drama Flight Nurse (1953); and The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956) for her old High Sierra mentor Raoul Walsh, but after this the actress cut back on her film work in order to raise her family. Leslie didn’t fully step way from acting, however. She was a regular TV performer, with ’50s guest appearance on such programs as The Ford Television Theatre and GE Theater and, in the ’70s and ’80s, on Police Story, Charlie’s Angels, The Incredible Hulk and Murder, She Wrote. Her final acting role came in a 1991 TV movie, Fire in the Dark. Away from the cameras she was active in charity work and also had her own clothing line.
While she may have chafed at being typecast as one of Hollywood’s “good girls,” Joan Leslie lived up to the billing both on and off the screen, and managed to make the best of a successful if relatively brief movie career.