Jo-Carroll Dennison, who parlayed her victory within the 1942 Miss America contest into an appearing profession that noticed her seem in movies together with Winged Victory and The Jolson Story, has died. She was 97.
Dennison died Oct. 18 at her house in Idyllwild, California, her son, Peter Stoneham, advised The New York Occasions.
A contract participant at twentieth Century Fox, Dennison additionally had uncredited roles in The Track of Bernadette (1943), One thing for the Boys (1944) — the place she first met her future husband, actor Phil Silvers — and State Truthful (1945) and appeared on tv in Lux Video Theater, in a Dick Tracy sequence and on an episode of The Abbott and Costello Present.
She was married to Silvers from 1945 till their 1950 divorce and to TV producer Russell Stoneham (The Streets of San Francisco, Barnaby Jones) from 1954 till their 1981 divorce.
Dennison was born on Dec. 16, 1923, in a males’s jail in Florence, Arizona. Her mother and father, Elizabeth and Harry, had stopped within the space whereas driving from Texas to California.
As a teenager, she sang, tap-danced and acted in her of us’ touring drugs present.
In Tyler, Texas, the place she was attending enterprise faculty, a neighborhood man stopped her on the road and requested her to symbolize his financial institution within the city’s magnificence contest. She received that pageant and several other others on the best way to being chosen Miss America in 1942, then entertained the troops throughout World Warfare II.
“Again in 1942, the pageant was largely about appears. But, I by no means thought I had received due to the best way I appeared, however slightly due to the best way I felt about myself,” she stated as Miss America celebrated its 100 anniversary final month.
“With this in thoughts, I flat-out refused to put on my bathing go well with on the stage after the pageant, starting with my very first tour cease on the Faye Theater in Philadelphia. I’m so delighted that the Miss America Group has embraced this precept and now focuses on the totality of every candidate.”
Additionally final month, she revealed her memoirs, Discovering My Little Pink Hat.
Survivors embody her sons, Peter and John, and three grandchildren.
