Joan Alexander, the voice of Lois Lane in The Adventures of Superman, died on May 21st at New York Presbyterian Hospital, from complications from an intestinal blockage. She was 94 years old.
Joan Alexander: Voice of Lois Lane, Socialite
Joan Alexander was born Louise Abrass in St. Paul, Minnesota, on April 16 1915, to Lebanese-American parents. Her father died when she was 3 and her mother remarried, moving the family to Brooklyn, New York. Her stepfather eventually sent Louise to a convent school on Long Island.
While in her teens, she became a model and actress, studying under Yiddish theatre director Benno Schneider. She changed her name to Joan Alexander: the first name was a tribute to actor Joan Crawford, but the reason for her surname remains a mystery.
Alexander's big break was in 1940, when she won the part of intrepid female reporter Lois Lane in The Adventures of Superman radio show at WOR, the first adaptation of the DC superhero who had made his comics debut 2 years earlier. She was the third actor, after Helen Choate and Rolly Bester, to be cast as Lane.
Alexander made her debut in the 7th episode and went on to voice the role of Lois Lane, alongside Superman voice actor Bud Collyer, for 11 years and 1,600 episodes.
"Joan is one of those rare actresses -- especially in radio where you can't be seen and have to depend entirely on voice," Collyer told an interviewer, "who can go in on something cold and her instincts are so right as an actress that, without even a rehearsal or a read-through, she is right."
Alexander and Collyer were so popular in their roles that they were used on countless Superman adaptations, including the influential Max Fleischer theatrical shorts that Paramount released in the early 1940's.
In 1944, she had a short-lived (and highly secretive) marriage with actor John Sylvester White, who later played Principal Woodman in the 1970's sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. Shortly after her divorce, she married surgeon Robert Crowley, but they divorced in 1955. They had one daughter, novelist and screenwriter Jane Hitchcock Stanton.
After The New Adventures of Superman went off the air, Alexander was cast as intrepid secretary Della Street in the Perry Mason radio show. From 1951 to 1955, she also appeared on television as a regular guest on the ABC-TV game show The Name's the Same.
Shortly after divorcing Crowley, Alexander married again, this time to automotive distributor Arthur Stanton, who introduced the Volkswagen Beetle to the North American market. She had 3 sons with Stanton: Jonathan, Adam (who died in 1993) and Timothy.
During this period, she shelved her acting career in favour of becoming a homemaker and socialite, patronizing artists such as author George Plimpton, playwright Neil Simon and composer Leonard Bernstein. However, Alexander still took on the occasional acting role: In 1964, she appeared on Broadway in Jean Kerr's play Poor Richard and in 1966, she reunited with Bud Collyer for the short-lived Filmation animated series The New Adventures of Superman.
Arthur Stanton died in 1987, leaving Alexander with a $70 million fortune. At the time of her death, she was suing financial adviser Kenneth Ira Starr, who she claimed had squandered a large portion of her estate on questionable investments.
