Pat Crowley, the Golden Globe-winning actor who starred in shows like Please Don’t Eat The Daisies and Port Charles, has died, according to Deadline. Her son Jon Hookstratten (EVP at Sony Pictures) confirmed the news, sharing that his mother died of natural causes on Sunday just days before her birthday. She was 91 years old.
Crowley was born in 1933 in Olyphant, Pennsylvania, later moving to New York and attending the High School of the Performing Arts. She began modeling and performing on stage before transitioning to the screen. Her early performances in Forever Female opposite Ginger Rogers and William Holden and in the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis film Money From Home earned her the Golden Globe for New Star of the Year in 1954. She went on to star in films opposite Rosemary Clooney, Barbara Stanwyck, and Tony Curtis.
In 1965, she was cast as the lead in the sitcom Please Don’t Eat The Daisies, based on the Doris Day film (and the 1957 book by Jean Kerr) of the same name. Crowley played Joan Nash, a journalist and mother who eschewed the typical role of housewife, for two seasons. “It was a great role for me, because she was very independent, very feisty… having fun raising her kids, which I sort of did. I loved having fun with the kids when they were that age, and so I think we brought that to the show,” Crowley said later in an interview for The Pioneers Of Television. “I liked the fact that she worked, I liked the fact that her career was important. She was kind of juggling it all. I liked the fact that—up to then, the women were wonderful, but they all wear the skirts, and they all… just didn’t seem to have a lot of dimension. These, we always had a message in the show. But I did like the idea that she was able to juggle everything, because that’s what I was trying to do too.”
Over the course of her career, Pat Crowley racked up more than 100 film and television credits, appearing on popular shows like The Twilight Zone, Bonanza, Columbo, Happy Days, Hawaii Five-0, Charlie’s Angels, Frasier, Friends, Charmed, and many more. She starred in the series Joe Forrester from 1975 to 1976 and had an arc as the character Emily Fallmont on Dynasty in 1986. She appeared on several soap operas, most notably playing Mary Scanlon on Port Charles. Her final credit was the 2012 film Mont Reve.
