Patricia Crowley

This blonde American actress with the look of an eternal ingenue was working on Broadway and in TV when still a teenager. Her older sister Ann had arranged for her to have a walk-on in a musical in 1943 and her career blossomed. By age 18, Patricia Crowley had appeared in several summer stock productions and had the lead in her own TV series. Over the ensuing decades, she has clung to a career through a myriad of guest appearances on TV long after many of her contemporaries have been forgotten.

Crowley (who was billed as 'Pat Crowley' during most of the 1950s), had her best adult vehicle in the TV adaptation of "Please Don't Eat the Daisies" (NBC, 1965-1967), in which she was the rather unconventional suburban writer-mother-homemaker Joan Nash. More recently, she returned to daytime TV as the matriarch Mary Scanlon on ABC's soap "Port Charles" (1997-2004).

Crowley began acting professionally even before she was a student at New York's famed High School for the Performing Arts. She was a stage veteran in 1950, when she made her Broadway debut in "Southern Exposure," and also had amassed a number of small screen credits as well.

Crowley landed the leading role of a youngster facing all the trials and tribulations of nice girls of the era in "A Date With Judy" (ABC, 1951-52), a sitcom designed for Saturday morning and teen viewers (long before "Saved By the Bell"). She was not with the show when it switched to primetime, however, as Crowley had relocated to L.A. where Paramount cast her in her screen debut, "Forever Female" (1953), as the ingenue competing with aging star Ginger Rogers for the attentions of playwright William Holden.

The studio then put her in the 3-D Martin and Lewis opus "Money From Home" (also 1953) and in a forgettable musical Western spoof "Red Garters" (1954). She was boxer Tony Curtis' girl in "The Square Jungle" for Universal in 1955, and began being billed as Patricia Crowley in "The Scarface Mob" (1962).

By the 70s, the actress had graduated to mother roles (i.e., as parent of Johnnie Whitaker in "The Biscuit Eater" 1972) but by decade's end, with 1977's "Off the Wall," her feature film career had all but petered out. Yet, there has always seemed to be TV. Besides dozens of guest appearances, Crowley co-starred as the love interest to Lloyd Bridges' "Joe Forrester" (NBC, 1975-1976) and had the recurring role of Emily Fallmont, the indiscreet wife of a senator, on ABC's "Dynasty" in 1986.

She moved into daytime dramas, playing Rebecca Whitmore, the wealthy woman whose family had fallen on harder times, in "Generations" (NBC), but left the cast after a few months in 1989.

Among Crowley's other many credits through the years was a 1960 busted pilot, "All in the Family," about a family that had gone from wealth to poverty.