Joyce Mackenzie

This starlet of the early 50s once self-deprecatingly described herself as "a poor man's movie star". She was born Joyce Elaine Mackenzie in Redwood, California, a doctor's daughter. During the war years her sobriquet was 'Joyce the Joiner', toiling as a carpenter's assistant at the shipbuilding company Western Pipe and Steel. This helped pay for her acting tuition. After the war, Joyce got her foot in the door selling tickets and getting occasional acting gigs at the Pasadena Playhouse. Like so many other debutantes, she was spotted by a talent scout (in 1948) and wound up as the only female character (albeit uncredited) in the air force drama Twelve O'Clock High (1949). Her first featured role for 20th Century Fox was as a rival to Dorothy McGuire in the marital comedy Mother Didn't Tell Me (1950). Joyce had a rare opportunity for top billing on a loan-out to RKO, but the resulting second feature (Destination Murder (1950)) turned out to be a tepid potboiler for which the studio had acquired the rights on the cheap from a Poverty Row outfit. Nonetheless, Joyce racked up fifteen film credits over the next three years, including solid supporting roles in A-grade releases like Broken Arrow (1950), On the Riviera (1951), The Racket (1951) and Deadline - U.S.A. (1952), opposite big time box-office stars James Stewart, Danny Kaye, Robert Mitchum and Humphrey Bogart, respectively. She also famously played Jane to Lex Barker's Tarzan in Tarzan and the She-Devil (1953) (again for RKO), becoming the eleventh actress cast in that role thus far. Her penultimate film was The French Line (1953), a musical comedy (released in 3-D) in which Joyce (playing a model) swapped identities with Jane Russell. Joyce retired from acting in the early 60s after guest starring in an episode of Perry Mason (1957). By 1976, she had switched professions, working as an English teacher at a high school in Laguna Niguel, California. She was married three times, respectively to real estate mogul Walter Leimert, construction tycoon Robert L. Driver and, finally, to Victor Benedict Hassing, who predeceased her in 1980.