Beauty and the Beast

We are winding up a blog series about Supportive Women. One of the women I wanted to include was Jo Anne Worley. I didn’t know much about her apart from her appearances on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In and being in my favorite made-for-television movie, The Feminist and the Fuzz.

Jo Anne was born in 1937 in Lowell, Indiana. Her loud voice was not an acting tool. She always felt she was loud. She said, “I have a big mouth, and I’m sorry to say I’ve always had one. When I was young, in church, I never sang with everybody else. I only mouthed the hymns, so I wouldn’t drown anyone else out. I have my quiet moments. But I don’t have many.” She was named school comedienne at her high school.

In one interview with a Lowell reporter, she said “I’ll never forget the place I’d work every summer while in high school. It was called Robert’s Hotel, Gas and Café, and it was at the intersection of US 41 and Highway 2. They had an old juke box in the café where I worked, and I’d sing and joke around whenever the business was slow, which seemed like most of the time.”

After graduation, Worley moved to Blauvelt, New York to work with the Pickwick Players. She was later offered a scholarship to Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. After two years at the school, she moved to Los Angeles City College and enrolled at the Pasadena Playhouse. Her first musical role was in “Wonderful Town.”

In 1961 she was in the off-Broadway musical show “Billy Barnes Revue” with Charles Nelson Reilly and Larry Hovis (who was Carter on Hogan’s Heroes). The original show in 1959 featured Bert Convy, Joyce Jameson, Patti Regan, Ken Berry, Ann Guilbert, Jackie Joseph, and Len Weinrib.

Jo Anne was in two episodes of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis in 1961-2. During the rest of the sixties, she was offered several big-screen roles.

In 1964 she was given a role in “Hello, Dolly.” A year later she developed her own comedy and singing act in Greenwich Village where she was discovered there by Merv Griffin.

Griffin encouraged her to appear on his show which she did forty times. Like Marcia Wallace, who we learned about last week, her appearance on Merv Griffin was seen by someone who recommended her for a new show. In this case, George Schlatter cast her in Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.

Worley left the show in 1970. She made guest appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. She also appeared on several game shows, including Super Password, Hollywood Squares, and many versions of Pyramid.

In 1971 she made the television movie I discussed above, The Feminist and the Fuzz. It starred David Hartman, Barbara Eden, Farrah Fawcett, Worley, Julie Newmar, and Henry Morgan. I would love to see it again.

For most of her career, Worley would be providing voices for animation. However, she appeared in a handful of shows during the seventies and eighties, including Adam 12, Love American Style, Hawaii Five-0, CHiPs, Murder She Wrote, The Love Boat, Mad About You, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and The Middle.

In 1975, Worley married Roger Perry. They would stay together for 25 years, divorcing in 2000. Perry has 95 acting credits and appeared in many popular shows in the seventies, eighties, and nineties. He was also in The Feminist and The Fuzz. After divorcing Worley, he would marry actress Joyce Bulifant.

During the seventies and eighties, Worley did a lot of regional theater in Milwaukee and several cities in California.

In the 1990s she got involved with Disney and provided her voice for Beauty and the Beast and A Goofy Movie. She also was on several Disney series including Kim Possible and the Wizards of Waverly Place.

She was in a limited run of a musical production of “The Wizard of Oz,” playing the wicked witch of the west in 1999. In 2007, she appeared on Broadway as Mrs. Tottendale in “The Drowsy Chaperone,” and she reprised the role in 2015 at The Cape Playhouse. She was also cast in “Wicked” as Madame Morrible in 2008.

Jo Anne Worley once said, “my goal in life is to be the kind of person my dog thinks I am.” That seems to be good advice for all of us. It was fun getting to know a little more about this funny woman. We love her as much as her dog did.

We are celebrating National State days this month. This week we are celebrating Oregon. I’m sure a lot of stars grew up in Oregon, but my choice is David Ogden Stiers. Although Stiers was born in Illinois on Halloween in 1942, his family moved to Eugene, Oregon when he was in high school. Based on his life, I think Oregon has the better claim to him. After graduation, Stiers enrolled in the University of Oregon.

Early in his career, Stiers moved to San Francisco, performing with the California Shakespeare Theater, the San Francisco Actors Workshop, and the improv group, The Committee. I would like to learn more about The Committee whose members included Rob Reiner, Howard Hesseman, and Peter Bonerz.

In the 1960s, Stiers moved to New York to study at Juilliard for a couple of years and was able to appear in numerous Broadway productions. At Juilliard, Stiers was mentored by John Houseman.

Stiers was a prolific actor, appearing in 38 big screen movies, 39 made-for-tv movies, and more than 90 different television series.

In the 1970s, he showed up on Kojak, Charlie’s Angels, Phyllis, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Rhoda, The Tony Randall Show, and Paper Chase.

Most of us got to know him as Major Charles Emerson Winchester III on M*A*S*H. He became part of the cast in 1977 and continued with the show until it ended in 1983. As Winchester, Stiers would receive two Emmy nominations in 1981 and 1982. Both years he got beat by a Taxi alumni, Danny DeVito in 81 and Christopher Lloyd in 82.

Winchester replaced Frank Burns whom Hawkeye and Hunnicutt made fun of for his inept medical skills. Charles was a brilliant surgeon but was an aristocrat from Boston and never let anyone forget it. However, as with all M*A*S*H characters, Winchester continues to evolve, and we learn more about his past and how that affected his personality.

Stiers always described Harry Morgan as his acting mentor, but he loved the entire cast. Although Stiers could come off a bit like Winchester at first meeting, once he got to know you, his castmates said “the walls came down and you saw a sweet, tender man.” Kellye Nakahara (Nurse Kellye) shared that she used to jump into Stier’s arms every morning so he could twirl her around like a princess at a ball.” Loretta Swit said “he was very much his own person, but he loved and adored us as we did him.” Executive producer Burt Metcalfe reported that “I have always felt that one of the reasons for the show’s success was that the audience sensed that the characters loved another and they loved the characters. And that love goes down to the actors.” All his coworkers described Stiers as a prankster on the set.

His life after M*A*S*H included roles on a variety of shows, including Alf, Wings, Star Trek, Murder She Wrote, Dr. Quinn, Ally McBeal, The Outer Limits, Touched by An Angel, and Frasier.

He would also receive recurring roles in four additional series during his career. In Two Guys, A Girl and A Pizza Place, he played Mr. Bauer.

I never watched Love & Money, but Stiers played the wealthy Nicholas Conklin; the show is described as “The penthouse-residing Conklin family of scholars and the basement-dwelling McBride family of maintenance men find themselves unhappily linked when the heiress daughter and blue-collar son fall in love.”

I also never watched the Dead Zone, but Stiers played Reverend Purdy in the show where “Johnny had the perfect life until he was in a coma for six years When he awoke, he found his fiancé married to another man, his son doesn’t know him, and everything had changed including Johnny because he can now ‘see’ things.”

Rizzoli & Isles 6x09 - Love Taps - Recap - Pop City Life — *Stiers with Sasha Alexander*–Photo: popcitylife.com

He also played Arthur Isles in Rizzoli & Isles, one of my favorite shows from the past few years.

You could also hear Stiers in a number of animation films including Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, and the Lilo and Stitch movies. He narrated many audiobooks as well.

One of the reasons Oregon can lay claim to Stiers is because he continued to live in Newport and spent his later years as a conductor for the Newport Symphony Orchestra. As a fan of classical music, Stiers was able to be a guest conductor in more than 70 orchestras around the world. Newport seems to be a quirky, but fun, place with a population of only about 10,000. It is definitely on my list of places to visit.

In 2018, Stiers passed away from bladder cancer. He generously bequeathed funding for a variety of cultural groups including the Newport Symphony, the Newport Public Library, and the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts.

I appreciate that Stiers loved and celebrated the arts. One of his thoughts about experiencing culture was: “The thing I love about the arts—music, theater, museums, galleries—is that everybody wins. You are touched and hopefully moved, and it is unique to each person. Even though you may have listened to the same performance, what you heard could be vastly different from what anyone else heard.” I’m happy that he was able to spend the last years of his life doing something he enjoyed so much after a life of giving to others through his acting performances—something we can all aspire to.

thewritelife61

How pop culture influences us

Jo Anne Worley: What a Character

Celebrating National Oregon Day with David Ogden Stiers