Joanna Barnes, an actress, author, and newspaper columnist who starred in The Parent Trap and Auntie Mame and played unlikable young women, has passed away. She was 87.
Barnes passed away on Friday at her residence in The Sea Ranch, California, after battling “many health issues,” according to a friend who spoke to The Hollywood Reporter on her behalf.
In Tarzan, the Ape Man (1959), Barnes also played Jane opposite Denny Miller. She later acted alongside Kirk Douglas in Spartacus (1960) and The War Wagon (1967), as well as Tony Curtis in Goodbye Charlie (1964) and Don’t Make Waves (1967). (1967).
On the 1965–1966 CBS drama The Trials of O’Brien, the Boston native portrayed the ex-wife of Peter Falk’s Shakespeare-quoting lawyer. She was also a welcome guest star on dozens of other shows, including Maverick, 77 Sunset Strip, Mannix, The Beverly Hillbillies, Barney Miller, Fantasy Island, Hart to Hart, and Benson.
Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College, Barnes hosted the weekday ABC programme Dateline in 1967, interviewing celebrities and giving viewers tours of popular entertainment locations. — Hollywood In addition to serving as a frequent panellist on the CBS game show What’s My Line?, Rona Barrett provided the program’s gossip.
After her debut work, The Deceivers, about a young actress growing up estranged in Hollywood, was initially published in 1970, a New York Times book reviewer referred to Barnes as “Jacqueline Susann with a brain.”
Pastora, her third book, was published in 1980 and is a 750-page historical epic that Kevin Mims compared to “California’s Gone With the Wind.” It does for the most well-known historical era in California—the Gold Rush—what Margaret Mitchell’s book accomplished for the most well-known historical era in the American South—the Civil War.
Barnes also regularly reviewed books for the Los Angeles Times and created the syndicated interior design column “Touching Home.”
For her portrayal of Gloria Upson, the snobbish debutante betrothed to Roger Smith’s Patrick Dennis in Auntie Mame (1958), starring Rosalind Russell, Barnes was nominated for a Golden Globe for most promising female newcomer.
She first appeared as the ruthless gold-digger Vicki Robinson in The Parent Trap (1961), starring Hayley Mills, and later returned in the 1998 Lindsay Lohan adaptation as the mother of that child-hating woman.
Barnes, who was born on November 15, 1934, in Boston, went to Milton Academy before majoring in English at Smith. After graduation in 1956, he received an opportunity to work for Time-Life Publishing. In order to write about the experience, she auditioned for and was cast in an acting role alongside Louis Jourdan on ABC’s Ford Television Theatre in 1957.
After that, Barnes had appearances on Warner Bros. TV series like Colt.45, Cheyenne, and Hawaiian Eye. Later, Barnes acted as Dennis Morgan’s assistant on the NBC summer 1959 detective series 21 Beacon Street. In the same year, she collaborated with Smith on the movie No Time to Be Young.
In Violent Road (1958), Onionhead (1958), The Purple Hills (1961), Too Many Thieves (1966), and I Wonder Who’s Killing Her Now, she also made an appearance on the big screen (1975).
Barnes was married three times: once to Richard Herndon, once to actor, director, and narrator Lawrence Dobkin, and once to architect Jack Lionel Warner, whose company worked on projects for the Bel-Air Country Club and Los Angeles Country Club, from 1980 until his death in 2012. In 2005, she transferred with Warner from Montecito to The Sea Ranch.
She is survived by her stepchildren John, Laura, and Louise as well as her sisters Lally and Judith.
