The only actress to play Jane with two different Tarzans, Brenda Joyce, gone at 92.
Joyce, passed July 4 at a Santa Monica nursing home. Sadly, the sexy thesp had suffered from dementia for a decade.
Brenda, the rare blonde Jane, first went swinging with brawny Johnny Weissmuller in Tarzan and the Amazons after Maureen O’Sullivan ankled the Edgar Rice Burroughs’ film series.
Her last jungle foray was with Lex Barker in 1949’s Tarzan’s Magic Fountain after he succeeded Jungle Johnny.
Brenda was born Betty Graftina Leabo on Feb. 25, 1917, in Excelsior Springs, Missouri and worked as a model before being discovered by 20th Century Fox in 1939.
She made her film debut in the classic The Rains Came with Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power and went on to make more than two dozen films including such B-movie fare as Pillow of Death with Lon Chaney, Jr. (1945) and The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946).
In 1941, she married her college sweetheart and had three children before divorcing. A second marriage also ended in a painful divorce.
One of Brenda’s rare post 1940s appearances was as herself in two eps of kid vid Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in the 1970s.
Au voir, Brenda.
