Fizzy blonde of 30s movies dies

Press, 27 December 1979, Page 6

Fizzy blonde of 30s movies dies

NZPA Santa Monica, California Joan Blondel!, the warmhearted, wise-cracking blonde in scores of movies in the 1930 s and 1940 s before she took On more motherly character roles in television, died on Christmas Day of leukemia. She was 73. Born into a vaudeville family in New York City, Miss Biondell made her stage debut at the age of three, hit the big time on Broadway in “Maggie the Magnificent,” opposite James Cagney, then rode its success into a contract with ! Warner Brothers Pictures. 1 In a dizzying succession

of films she could hardly recall later in life, she worked — usually six days a week — with such stars as Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Spencer Tracey, Clark Gable, Leslie Howard, Errol! Flynn, Pat O’Brien, and Robert Taylor, She built an image as the brassy, breezy, saucy showgirl, typist, or girl reporter. Later she was able to look honestly and with good humour at that public facade. “I was the fizz on the soda,” said Miss Blondell, who was quiet and retiring and lived her later life unpretentiously in a hilltop home Jn the Los Angeles suburfFof Sherman Oaks. In her heyday she lived on

the grand scale of a movie glamour queen. married three times, and had a number of homes in New York and Hollywood. She confessed once that all she ever wanted was to have one husband and one house and one garden and a lot of children. Her first marriage was to a cinematographer, George Barnes, who she said was “the first one to make us look beautiful on that old, harsh, black-and-white film.” She married the singeractor, Dick Powell, in 1936 and they were divorced eight years later. Her last marriage was to the showman Mike Todd, wftom she married in 1947.