Celebrity Biographies
Brenda Joyce
In the 1940s he was a star on Fox, and could have been quite popular had he continued his career. But she decided to leave the cinema. Before she had become the second Jane of the Tarzan movies and she continued in the saga after the departure of Johnny Weissmuler himself. The actress herself died on July 4, 2009 in Santa Monica, at the age of 92, after a decade suffering from dementia.
Born on February 25, 1912, Betty Leavo moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was five years old. Nicknamed ‘Graftina’ by her father, when she was very young she took advantage of her great physical attractiveness to pose as a model photographer, an occupation that allowed him to pay for her studies at UCLA. A person in charge of Fox discovered her in some photos of her published in a fashion magazine, and she decided to offer him a contract. The studio changed her name to Brenda Joyce, after silent film star Alice Joyce ( Dancing Mothers ). She made her film debut with an important role in It Came the Rains , alongside Tyrone Power and Myrna Loy . The reviews at the time were very appreciative.
Brenda Joyce did very well early in her career, most notably with two Henry King titles , the comedy A City Wakes , with Fred MacMurray and Alice Faye , and the drama Maryland , where she was the lead opposite Walter Brennan . and John Payne . But she fell in love with the military Owen Ward, and she decided to marry him despite the explicit opposition of Fox, for which she was supposedly relegated to series B, until she decided to leave the cinema. It wasn’t long before she returned, when Johnny Weissmuler, the popular Tarzan, handpicked her to replace Maureen O’Sullivan, who was after Tarzan in New York .In 1942, she had decided to leave the cinema to take care of her husband, sick with typhus, and their seven children. Brenda Joyce was the companion of the King of the Apes in Tarzan and the Amazons , and since the series was still very popular despite O’Sullivan’s absence, Joyce again accompanied Weissmuler in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman and Tarzan and the Huntress , by Kurt Neumann , and in Tarzan and the Sirens , by Robert Florey .
When Johnny Weissmuler stopped being Tarzan for good to play Jungle Jim, Brenda Joyce continued on the series, starring in Tarzan and the Magic Fountain , with Lex Barker , the actor’s replacement. She thus became the only Jane to have had two ‘tarzans’. Although she, at that time, she also appeared in other titles, such as The Little Freak, Abbott and Costello’s comedy directed by William A. Seiter , The Spider Woman Strikes Again , by Arthur Lubin and Shaggy, by Robert Emmet Tansey, Brenda decided to leave the cinema to dedicate herself to gardening, and her three children, after her traumatic divorce. Since she left Hollywood, Brenda Joyce lived completely away from public life. It is known that she was a very active woman in charity work, collaborating with a Catholic community as she was a fervent believer.