Joan Evans

Cast

Born

July 18, 1934 · New York City, New York, USA

Died

October 21, 2023

Birth name

Joan Katherine Eunson

Joan Katherine Eunson was the daughter of playwright/screenwriter Dale Eunson and movie press agent, journalist and writer Katherine Albert. They were friends with Joan Crawford who became her godmother. With such connections in show business, it was always on the cards that teenaged Joan would divide her time "between the Broadway theatrical world and the swimming pools of Hollywood". Brought up in an adult world, she attended the Birch Wathen Lenox School in Manhattan, but dropped out before her sophomore year when she was signed at 14 years of age by Samuel Goldwyn. At that time, she had no formal dramatic training and only limited stage experience. However, a New York theatre critic had seen her perform as a child in the play Guest in the House and recommended her to Goldwyn who had been casting for a teenage lead in his next film. Thus, Joan (now billed as 'Joan Evans') made her film debut opposite Farley Granger in the title role of Roseanna McCoy (1949). The wafer-thin romance was set against the background of the infamous hillbilly feud between the Hatfield and McCoy families which began in 1863 and lasted 28 years. Since the age of consent was 16, her parents lied about their daughter's date of birth prior to the picture's release, adding two years to her age. She appeared with Granger in two more RKO productions (Our Very Own (1950) and Edge of Doom (1950)) before headlining as a teenager driven to the brink of suicide by uncaring and irresponsible parents (played by Melvyn Douglas and Lynn Bari) in On the Loose (1951). The melodramatic screenplay was written by Evans' parents. Next, she was loaned to MGM to appear in the Esther Williams musical Skirts Ahoy! (1952) (for the musical numbers her voice was dubbed by another Joan: vocalist Joan Elms), then to Universal to play Irene Dunne's daughter in It Grows on Trees (1952). Ironically, Skirts Ahoy was produced by Joe Pasternak, whose screen test Evans had failed years earlier. On that occasion, Pasternak had expressed the opinion that she would never make it in pictures. Evans made a few more films, including a couple of westerns opposite Audie Murphy (Column South (1953) and No Name on the Bullet (1959)), the circus drama The Flying Fontaines (1959) and the noirish crime thriller The Walking Target (1960). She had several TV guest roles before retiring from acting in 1961, her last outing being an episode of Laramie (1959) . In 1952, she married a car dealer named Gerald Kirby Weatherly (over the objections of her parents who thought her too young for wedlock) who asked her godmother, Joan Crawford, to try to talk her out of it. Instead, a secret wedding ceremony was performed in Crawford's home and Evans' parents were not informed. This ended the friendship between Evans' parents and Crawford but the marriage, against all odds, was a success and lasted until Evans' death in 2023. The Weatherlys had two children. Post-retirement, Joan Weatherly devoted herself to family life. She worked for some time as an editor for the Hollywood Studio Magazine before becoming director of the Carden Academy in Van Nuys during the 1970s, teaching the largely classical-based "Carden Method".