Born: September 17th, 1933
Died: September 14th, 2025
Pat Crowley, an actress of Hollywood’s golden age who appeared alongside some of the biggest names of the 1950s before finding long-lasting success on television, died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 91.
Her death was confirmed by her son, Jon Hookstratten, who is the executive vice-president of administration and operations at Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Crowley first appeared on television and Broadway straight out of high school, and with her charisma, warmth and energy, was soon on course to become a leading actress of the era.
Her Hollywood introduction came with the release of two Paramount films, including Money From Home (1953), her first of two Martin and Lewis comedies. She played the veterinarian love interest of Jerry Lewis’s character, an offbeat cousin of a gambler played by Dean Martin. (The film also marked the beginning of a decades-long professional relationship with Martin, whose variety show would have her as a guest.)
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In Forever Female (1954), a theatre industry comedy written by brothers Julius and Philip Epstein that was loosely adapted from JM Barrie’s play Rosalind, she played a spirited teenager aiming for a role desired by a fading star (Ginger Rogers), who eventually comes to terms with taking the part of the mother. William Holden and Paul Douglas also starred.
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For both performances, Crowley won a Golden Globe in 1954 as “new star of the year.” (The category was discontinued in the 1980s.)
Often promoted as the ingenue, Crowley continued starring alongside some of the biggest names of the day. She appeared with Rosemary Clooney in the western musical spoof Red Garters (1954) and with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Douglas Sirk’s noir-inspired film There’s Always Tomorrow (1956). In The Square Jungle (1955), she starred opposite Tony Curtis, playing the love interest of his character, a grocery clerk trying to make it as a boxer.
But she never reached the level of stardom anticipated by Paramount, and she was let go from the studio for unspecified reasons. She continued to act, but her career shifted mostly to television.
“The business of this business is really tricky, and I was never really into that,” Crowley said. “I never had a manager. I never had a publicity person. I was in that medium thing where I would have an agent call and say, ‘Go and do this audition’.”
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Her success on the small screen, largely in guest-starring roles, would endure for several decades. Her role as the ex-wife of a captain in the military drama The Lieutenant (1963) impressed her costar Robert Vaughn so much that he picked her to play a midwestern housewife thrust into the glamorous world of espionage in the pilot episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964), in which he starred alongside David McCallum. It included a memorable scene of Crowley and Vaughn, drenched from sweat and steam, locked in a boiler room and suspended from a pipe.
Crowley’s career received a lift in 1965 with Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, a family sitcom adapted from the book by Jean Kerr. She starred as Joan Nash, a newspaper columnist in a household with four boys, a sheepdog and a college professor husband. Crowley identified with Kerr, who loosely based the main character on herself; they were both from northeast Pennsylvania.
Patricia Margaret Crowley was born in 1933, in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, the younger of two daughters of Vincent and Helen (Swartz) Crowley. Her father was a foreman in the coal mines. Her mother was a homemaker who loved music and theatre.
As a teenager, Pat’s sister, Ann, was discovered by Frank La Forge, a prominent pianist and vocal coach, after singing at a local men’s luncheon where he was also performing. He said he would train her in New York, and Ann left for the city with her mother. The next year, the other half of the family followed and moved into an apartment in the Hell’s Kitchen neighbourhood of Manhattan.
In a touring performance of Carousel, in which her sister starred, the young Crowley had a walk-on part in the chorus. She continued to act, sing and dance, graduating from Manhattan’s High School of Performing Arts in 1950 in the same class as comic actor Dom DeLuise.
After high school, Crowley took part in several theatre productions, drawing praise for her performances. (In a review of Margo Jones’s Southern Exposure, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times called her “practically the only professional thing on the stage”).
She was honoured with a Theater World Award as one of the most promising personalities of the 1950-51 season, and also gained recognition as the title character in A Date With Judy, a live television show in the early 1950s that aired on Saturday mornings in New York.
In 1957, Crowley married Ed Hookstratten, who would become a prolific entertainment lawyer and agent. They had two children, and separated in the early 1980s. She married Andy Friendly, a television executive, in 1986.
In addition to her son, Crowley is survived by her husband; a daughter, Ann Osher; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.
Throughout her career, Crowley landed guest roles in an array of shows spanning decades and genres, including Columbo in 1971; Happy Days in 1980; Police Story, also in 1980; Beverly Hills, 90210 in 1997-98; and Friends in 1998. She also had recurring roles on soap operas, including Dynasty, Generations, Port Charles and The Bold and the Beautiful.
She returned to film for her final role, in 2012, in the indie romance Mont Rêve.
“I didn’t really have the face for film, like when you see the great beauties,” she said in 2020, reflecting on the early days of her career. “I always played the feisty little troublemaker.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
