Joan O’Brien, the actress and singer who shared a submarine with Cary Grant in Operation Petticoat and a romantic relationship with Elvis Presley in It Happened at the World’s Fair, has died. She was 89.
O’Brien’s death was confirmed Wednesday by her daughter, Melissa, in a brief phone call with The Hollywood Reporter. She did not wish to provide any details.
A onetime contract player at MGM, O’Brien also appeared alongside John Wayne in The Alamo (1960) and The Comancheros (1961) and starred in four films released in 1962: It’s Only Money, Six Black Horses, We Joined the Navy and Samar, opposite Jerry Lewis, Audie Murphy, Kenneth More and George Montgomery, respectively.
After making her big-screen debut as the girlfriend of Dean Jones’ overzealous law student in the drama Handle With Care (1958), O’Brien played the embarrassingly clumsy Second Lieutenant Dolores Crandall in the World War II comedy Operation Petticoat (1959), directed by Blake Edwards.
And in It Happened at the World’s Fair (1963), she portrayed a nurse at the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle who attends to pilot Mike Edwards (Presley) after he suffers a leg “injury” when kicked in the shin by a youngster (Kurt Russell in his first movie). They two wind up having dinner at the top of the Space Needle and falling in love.
In fact, she played lots of nurses during her career.
Joan Marie O’Brien was born on Valentine’s Day in 1936 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She and her family moved to California, and at age 15, she became a regular performer on Hometown Jamboree, a Los Angeles TV program hosted by country singer Cliffie Stone.
Around the time she graduated from Chaffey High School in Ontario, California, O’Brien began a four-year stint as a singer on CBS’ The Bob Crosby Show. In 1959, she stepped in for “Champagne Lady” Alice Lon on The Lawrence Welk Show and portrayed an opera singer on an episode of NBC’s Bat Masterson.
O’Brien also put her vocal talents to work in 1963 on The Dick Van Dyke Show episode “The Foul Weather Girl” when she played a high school friend of Rob’s (Van Dyke) who comes to New York looking to advance her career and makes Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) jealous.
A year later, she was a teacher in Get Yourself a College Girl (1964), also featuring Mary Ann Mobley, Chad Everett, Nancy Sinatra, The Dave Clark Five and The Animals.
O’Brien’s résumé included work on the Warner Bros. shows The Alaskans, Bronco, Cheyenne, The Roaring 20’s and Surfside 6 and such other series as M Squad, Markham, Wagon Train, Bachelor Father, Bus Stop, The Virginian, The Lieutenant and Perry Mason.
She also was on The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in 1964 and had a relationship with star Robert Vaughn. In January 1965, she swallowed the contents of a pill box at his home on Mulholland Drive and was hospitalized in a coma after what police termed an attempted suicide.
O’Brien didn’t do much acting after that, though she did sing with Harry James’ band.
O’Brien had brief marriages to guitarist Billy Strange, NBC executive John Meyers, actor-dancer Harvey Allen and artist Dino Kotopoulis — all those marriages ended in divorce — before she wed Malcolm Bernard Campbell, a retired U.S. military officer, in 1979. They were together until his 2004 death.