Joan Leslie: Hollywood actress who won hearts in sweetheart roles

Her career suffered when she took Jack Warner to court

Joan Leslie performs a dance routine from the 1943 movie "The Sky's the Limit" (AP)

Joan Leslie’s versatility and wholesome allure opposite leading men like Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire elevated her to stardom by the time she was 18. But her career nosedived after a dispute with a studio head.

Born in Detroit, and on the vaudeville and nightclub stage from childhood, she made her film debut aged 11 in the 1936 Greta Garbo melodrama Camille. Four years and a dozen films later, Warner Bros signed her and began grooming her for stardom. In High Sierra (1941), she was compelling as a girl with a deformed foot who brings out a tender side in Bogart’s hoodlum on the run. The same year she was Cooper’s mountain-girl love interest in Sergeant York (1941), a hit biopic of the war hero.

She continued her rise with good supporting roles in the circus drama The Wagons Roll at Night (1941), starring Bogart, and The Male Animal (1942), a college-set comedy with Henry Fonda and Olivia de Havilland. In Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), starring James Cagney as entertainer George M Cohan, Leslie played his supportive wife. In 1943 she was loaned to RKO for The Sky’s the Limit (1943), a dark-themed musical and one of the least-known Astaire vehicles. Astaire played a fighter pilot on leave who wants to forget the war, disguises himself as a civilian and tries to seduce Leslie.

She featured in a run of popular and patriotic musicals as the nice girl with pin-up looks. She was Ronald Reagan’s girlfriend in This Is the Army (1943) and endured other lightweight confections, including Rhapsody in Blue (1945), the heavily fictionalised biography of George Gershwin. Increasingly dissatisfied with born-to-be-good parts, she agitated for more mature roles, such as the town tramp in The Corn is Green (1945). But studio executives and influential directors could not see her making the transition from frothy sweetheart roles. “Maybe it’s because, so much of the time, I see you bicycling around the lot with an apple in your mouth,” director Edmund Goulding once told her.

Leslie challenged the provisions of her contract, signed when she was a minor. She won a settlement, freeing her from Warner Bros. but incurring the wrath of studio chief Jack Warner. She said Warner had her “blackballed”, and she was relegated to lacklustre dramas and westerns at poverty row studios. Her career was largely over by the time she was 25.

In 1950 she married a gynaecologist, and after raising her daughters, Leslie appeared in guest spots in TV series such as Murder, She Wrote. She later devoted much of her time to volunteering at a Catholic home for unmarried mothers in Los Angeles.

Jean Leslie, actress: born 26 January 1925; married William Caldwell (children); died 12 October 2015.

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