Jean Alexander

February 24, 1926

Rochester, New York, USA

Jean Alexander began her acting career while in high school in Rochester. Soon after graduation she joined Stanley Woolf's Civic Drama Guild of New York for a car-and-truck tour of "Junior Miss" (1945) and just months after WWII she was touring the South Pacific in "Petticoat Fever" with the USO. In New York, she trained as an actor with such luminaries as Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, and became a Lifetime Member of the Actors Studio in 1951. Jean played on, off, and off-off Broadway. She was featured in several films, including the noir classic "The Mob (1951)". Her TV credits include most golden-era prime-time drama anthologies, including The United States Steel Hour (1953), The Philco Television Playhouse (1948), Kraft Theatre (1947), and Studio One in Hollywood (1948), as well as serials such as "Decoy (1957)", "Martin Kane (1949)", "Ryan's Hope (1975)", and "Quincy M.E. (1976)". She made hundreds of TV commercials, and was best known as "The Savarin Girl" for over five years of award-winning work for Savarin Coffee on NBC's Saturday Night News (1950-55). Jean was one-sixth of The Improvisors (along with Larry Blyden and Ross Martin), who appeared for a season on one of the very first improv TV shows, "What Happens Now?" for New York's WOR-TV (1949-50); her own local N.Y. show, "Jean Alexander's Pet Party" on Channel 7, received an NYU award for best children's program. She most recently appeared in the films "Old Days (2008)" (2008--another award winner), "Chicken" (2008), and "Underwear (2009)" (2009) which won three film-festival awards. Her last performances were in video sketches for HBO and The Onion (2010-11). Jean married Jules Alexander in 1950 and divorced in 1952. She married Arnold Schulman in 1954; the marriage ended in divorce in 1974.