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Joyce Van Patten

This blonde actress, who has been on stage since her youth, developed into a fine character player of both comedy and drama, capable of a wide range from hard-as-nails dames to overbearing mothers to dull matrons to fraught, nervous Nellies. Her older brother Dick was already a working actor when their mother entered two-year old Joyce Van Patten in a Shirley Temple look-alike contest, which she won. Within four years, she was appearing on Broadway in "Love's Old Sweet Song." Over the course of the next fifty-odd years, Van Patten graced numerous plays including "Desk Set" (1952), with Shirley Booth and several of Neil Simon's efforts, including "I Ought to Be in Pictures" (1982, as the father's girlfriend), "Brighton Beach Memoirs" (1983, as the aunt) and "Rumors" (1989) and "Jake's Women" (1992). She has also proven a fine replacement for such actresses in Ellen Burstyn in "Same Time, Next Year" and Judith Ivey in "A Fair Country" (in 1996).