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| Rose Joan Blondell (August 30, 1906 – December 25, 1979) was an American actress who performed in more than one hundred movies and television productions for five decades as Joan Blondell. Joan's cradle was a property trunk as her vaudevillian parents moved from place to place; she made her first appearance on stage at the age of four months when she was carried on in a cradle as the daughter of Peggy Astaire in The Greatest Love. During the Great Depression, Blondell was one of the highest paid individuals in the United States. Her stirring rendition of "Remember My Forgotten Man" in the Busby Berkeley production of Gold Diggers of 1933, in which she co-starred with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler, became an anthem for the frustrations of the unemployed and the government's failed economic policies. Joan Blondell died of leukemia in Santa Monica, CA, on Christmas Day 1979 with her children and her sister at her bedside. She is interred in the Forrest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, CA. |
