Joan Leslie was seen as the progeny of Hollywood — a pretty young girl who could, without complaining, be put into any picture her bosses chose for her. In one film alone, she could be both the charming ingénue and a kind, white-haired old lady. The tough schedule she adhered to would have broken a weaker personality, but she seemed to revel in it — even though it brought its share of disappointments.
Leslie celebrated her 16th birthday while on the set of one of her most notable movies, Yankee Doodle Dandy. Jack L Warner, one of the Warner brothers and head of production at the studio, called a press conference so that gossip writers could gush and photographers could snap as she cut an enormous cake, while Warner kissed her affectionately on the cheek. Then came the big surprise, to both the assembled pressmen and to Leslie herself. From his pocket, Warner produced a gleaming key while an even more gleaming latest-model car was wheeled on to the soundstage, where the ceremony was being held. “This, darling Joan, is a gift for your birthday from your grateful studio,” declared her boss.
The flashbulbs popped andshe danced for joy. Yet when the reporters and photographers left, Warner asked for the key back. She never saw either it or the car to which it was allegedly attached again. “It was the way Hollywood was,” she would say, resignedly, a generation later.
Born in Michigan, Detroit, as Joan Agnes Theresa Sadie Brodel in 1925, she made her first appearance on a stage just before her third birthday. Her father John, a bank clerk, and mother Agnes, a pianist, were both devout Catholics. Like her sisters Betty and Mary, she learnt to play musical instruments at a young age and the girls performed together in a vaudeville act as the Three Brodels — partly to help support the family after their father lost his job in the Depression.
It was the beginning of a typical child-star career (Judy Garland, for instance, started out as Frances Ethel Gumm, playing with her two siblings as one of the Gumm Sisters). She went to New York in 1935 to find modelling work, gaining attention with her appearances in magazine spreads, and was invited to Hollywood (although at first she was not tied to a particular studio). In 1937, she was seen on screen for the first time, playing Robert Taylor’s little sister in Camille, an MGM movie based on the story by Alexandre Dumas, in which Taylor starred with Greta Garbo.
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In 1941 she was signed by Warner Bros, changed her name to Joan Leslie, and in a matter of months acted in a series of high-profile films for the studio. In that year alone, she had the role of Velma, the crippled girl helped by Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra, followed by parts in The Great Mr Nobody, The Wagons Roll at Night and Thieves Fall Out.
She also appeared as the female star opposite Gary Cooper in Sergeant York, about the First World War hillbilly hero — she was offered the role, it was said, at the insistence of the real Sergeant York who wanted the actress playing his fiancée to be someone who did not smoke, drink or swear. Leslie, who was once described as “sweet innocence without seeming too sugary”, fitted the criteria.
During a time when Hollywood wanted to fly the patriotic flag, she co-starred with James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy — the iconic biopic which told the story of the performer, producer and songwriter George M Cohan, who claimed to have been born on July 4 and who wrote the First World War hit Over There. The film was also made in 1941, but released the following year. Despite being 16, Leslie was playing Cagney��s ageing wife. During its production, the cast heard that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. “I will always remember how all the work came to stop,” she recalled, “and Jimmy said, ‘I think a prayer is called for here’.”
Yankee Doodle Dandy was followed by a number of other films in which she always played the wholesome girl next door. She even featured in a song by the Andrews Sisters (“We’re not petite like Joan Leslie”) and appeared with Fred Astaire in The Sky’s the Limit in 1943 — the same year in which she collaborated with Ronald Reagan in the all- soldier Irving Berlin musical This is the Army. In 1945, when she was 20, she played a fictionalised girlfriend of George Gershwin in the biopic Rhapsody in Blue.
In 1946 Leslie left Warner Bros acrimoniously, after extracting herself from a contract she described as “slavery”. She made a few more films, with such forgotten titles as Northwest Stampede, Men in the Saddle and Flight Nurse in 1953. Her last big screen role was in 1956 in The Revolt of Mamie Stover.
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From then on, she decided to concentrate on being a wife to William Caldwell, an obstetrician whom she married in 1950, and a mother to their identical twin daughters, Patrice and Ellen, who both became doctors and went into teaching. Caldwell predeceased her in 2000.
Gradually she returned to work, first as a successful dress designer and then with television roles in Charlie’s Angels and Murder She Wrote. Reflecting on the typecasting she experienced, she said in one interview: “In my case, I really was a nice girl; my family sheltered me.”
Joan Leslie, actress, was born on January 26, 1925. She died on October 12, 2015, aged 90