Kathleen Crowley

Kathleen Crowley

  • Birthday: 1931-12-26
  • Deathday: 2017-04-23
  • Also know as: Betty Jane Crowley

Biography

Betty Jane Kathleen Crowley (born December 26, 1931) was an American actress and was Miss New Jersey in 1949 and a contestant for Miss America in the same year (she came in sixth). After the pageants, she became an actress who specialized in being phenomenally seductive in TV series and movies. Most well known for playing a variety of sirens in TV's Maverick (1957) opposite James Garner, Jack Kelly, and Roger Moore, she appears in eight episodes, a series record for leading ladies; "The Jeweled Gun" (with Jack Kelly), "Maverick Springs" (with James Garner and Jack Kelly), "The Misfortune Teller" (with Garner), "A Bullet for the Teacher" (with Roger Moore), "Kiz" (with Moore), and "Dade City Dodge," "The Troubled Heir," and "One of Our Trains Is Missing," with Kelly. Crowley made 81 television appearances on various series and appeared in twenty movies between 1951 and 1970 (one of her last movie roles was in Downhill Racer with Robert Redford). Many of her films were low-budget sci-fi and horror movies, but she seemed to appear in practically every narrative television series produced in the late '50s and '60s, including Bourbon Street Beat, Surfside 6, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Bat Masterson, Bonanza, Branded, My Three Sons, Donna Reed, Perry Mason, Checkmate, Bronco, Route 66, Thriller, Batman, Disneyland, Family Affair, Rawhide, The Lone Ranger, and many others. Crowley was often confused with her acting contemporary Pat Crowley (frequently billed as "Patricia Crowley"), who appeared as guest leading lady in different episodes of many of the same television series and was not related. The two Crowleys were apparently never cast in the same episode. In the Philip Roth novel American Pastoral, the protagonist marries Miss New Jersey 1949, in the book named Dawn Dwyer and having few similarities to Crowley's post-Miss New Jersey life (including a poorer finish in the Miss America pageant). Description above from the Wikipedia article Kathleen Crowley,  licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Filmography

Target Earth

1954

As Nora King

Downhill Racer

1969

As American Newspaper Woman

City of Shadows

1955

As Fern Fellows

Westward Ho, The Wagons!

1956

As Laura Thompson

Female Jungle

1956

As Peggy Voe

Sabre Jet

1953

As Susan Crenshaw

FBI Code 98

1963

As Marian Nichols

The Rebel Set

1959

As Jeanne Mapes

The Farmer Takes a Wife

1953

As Susanna

The Flame Barrier

1958

As Carol Dahlmann

Curse of the Undead

1959

As Dolores Carter

Showdown

1963

As Estelle

The Phantom Stagecoach

1957

As Fran Maroon

The Quiet Gun

1957

As Teresa Carpenter

The Silver Whip

1953

As Kathy Riley

Seven Cities of Gold

1955

As Mother

The Lawyer

1970

As Alice Fiske

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