Joan Blondell Articles

Joan Blondell Q&A Pt.3: A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, Condoms and Censorship Though I know that Joan Blondell and Ann Sothern were quite different as performers, they often played no-nonsense, wisecracking dames in lots of programmers — Blondell at WB, Sothern at RKO and then MGM. Now, Sothern became an A-list player at MGM in the late 1940s, after having been around for more than [...]

Ted Donaldson, Joan Blondell, Peggy Ann Garner, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Joan Blondell Q&A Pt.2: Joan Blondell-Dick Powell-June Allyson Triangle, Lost Raunchy Pre-Coder CONVENTION CITY My favorite Joan Blondell performance is her Aunt Sissy in Elia Kazan's 20th Century-Fox drama A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945). How did she get that role? What was it like for her to work with Kazan, Peggy Ann [...]

Joan Blondell: Q&A with Biographer Matthew Kennedy Pt.1 What did Joan Blondell have to say about the musicals she made for Busby Berkeley? What about Ruby Keeler, James Cagney, and her other fellow contract players? Did she get along with them? [Photo: Joan Blondell in Mervyn LeRoy's Gold Diggers of 1933.] Joan said, not surprisingly, that those musicals were tough. There was extra rehearsal needed [...]

JOAN BLONDELL: A LIFE BETWEEN TAKES: Introduction to Q&A with Joan Blondell biographer Matthew Kennedy Why Joan Blondell? Actually, this book idea originally came from Joan's son, Norman Powell, who is a director and producer. I was writing a biography of the director Edmund Goulding a few years back, and Norman interviewed me for a documentary he was making on Old Hollywood. When we were [...]