Jennifer Howard

Jennifer Howard, born Clare Jenness Howard on March 23, 1925, in New York City, was an American stage, film, and television actress whose career spanned from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s. She was the daughter of dramatist Sidney Howard and actress Clare Eames, and a grandniece of the American opera singer Emma Eames. Through her mother's family she was also a great-granddaughter of William Thomas Hamilton, a governor of Maryland. Howard died on December 14, 1993, of lung cancer at age 68.

Her early life was marked by significant family losses. Her mother died in London in 1930, and the following year her father married Polly Damrosch, a daughter of the German-American conductor and composer Walter Damrosch. Her father died nine years after that in a tractor mishap on the family farm near Tyringham, Massachusetts. Howard was educated at Milton Academy and attended classes at Barnard College. In May 1946, she married Mortimer Halpern, an actor known as Morty Halpern who went on to work as a Broadway stage and production manager. At the time of their marriage, Howard was a member of the Theatre Guild Shakespeare Repertory Company, where Halpern served as stage manager. That marriage was short-lived. In August 1950, she married film producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., with whom she had four children, including business executive Francis Goldwyn, actor Tony Goldwyn, and studio executive John Goldwyn. That marriage ended in divorce approximately eighteen years later. On July 28, 1972, Howard married American artist John Ery Coleman in Los Angeles.

Howard's Broadway career unfolded across four productions between 1946 and 1949. Her first credit was a revival of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale at the Cort Theatre, running from January through February 1946, in which she played the First Lady. During the 1947–1948 season, she appeared as Penny in The Fatal Weakness, a play by George Kelly that ran for 119 performances at the Royale Theatre, now known as the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre. In September 1947, she became one of the founding members of the Actors Studio. The following year she played Vanilla in Sundown Beach, a short-lived Actors Studio production written by Bessie Breuer that staged at the Belasco Theatre. In November 1949, she took on the role of Louise Ulmer in Love Me Long, a comedy by Doris Frankel that ran for approximately two weeks at the 48th Street Theatre. That production was directed by Brock Pemberton, who had also directed the 1921 play Swords, which had launched the Broadway careers of both of Howard's parents.

Her television work began early and intersected with her stage career. On September 26, 1948, she played The Nurse in Portrait of a Madonna, adapted from a Tennessee Williams play and produced as the first teleplay of the early television series Actors Studio. During the late 1950s and into the early 1960s, she appeared in a wide range of American television series. In the Cheyenne episode "Land Beyond Law" in 1957, she played Ellen Ellwood. The following year she appeared in the Suspicion episode "Meeting in Paris" as the mayor's secretary, in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode "The Foghorn" as a nun, and in The Thin Man episode "Jittery Juror" as Joyce. In 1960, she played a nurse in The Twilight Zone episode "Eye of the Beholder," and in 1961 she appeared as Corinne Marsdon in the Checkmate episode "Laugh Till I Die." Howard also appeared in five episodes of Perry Mason across different seasons, portraying characters including Lorraine Selkirk Jennings, Judith Thatcher, Milly Nash, Winifred Dunbrack, and Madelon Haines Shelby.

Her film work included at least four features. She appeared uncredited as Mrs. Jackman in Return to Peyton Place in 1961 and uncredited as Myra in All Fall Down in 1962. That same year she played Addie Gates in House of Women and Grace Waterton in The Chapman Report. In addition to her performing career, Howard was also an accomplished watercolor and acrylic artist.