JOEL McCREA

Joel McCrea was an actor well remembered as a durable leading man of the late 1930s and early 1940s, but he was far from an overnight success; he made his first movie in 1927, but it took five years and 20 movies until he became a leading man, and even then, he tended to play the male lead to a stronger female actress; unfortunately, he lost many great parts to Gary Cooper, and played a lot of parts that Cooper turned down; but he had many very memorable performances, and continued acting all the way to 1976, with a very memorable performance as an aging cowboy in 1962's "Ride the High Country", opposite Randolph Scott, who came out of retirement to make this one last movie. Some of his movies include: Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and Foreign Correspondent. Note that he met actress Frances Dee while they were making a movie together in 1933, and they married that same year, and after that their marriage and their three sons took center stage in her life, so she only made sporadic movie and TV appearances in the 1940s and early 1950s (most notably in I Walked With a Zombie!), and then she completely retired in 1954, and McCrea mostly retired in 1962, and the two lived together at their 300 acre ranch in Thousand Oaks, California (they were quite wealthy). They remained married until he passed away in 1990 at the age of 84, and she passed away in 2004 at the age of 94.