Joan Alexander

Joan Alexander, born Louise Abrass on April 16, 1915, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, was an American actress whose career spanned Broadway, radio, television, and animation. She died on May 21, 2009, at the age of 94 from an intestinal blockage. Of Lebanese-American heritage, Alexander lost her father when she was three years old, and after her mother remarried, the family relocated to Brooklyn, New York. She attended a convent school on Long Island. She later studied acting in Europe under Benno Schneider, a director in the Yiddish theater, and also worked as a model. She adopted the first name Joan in tribute to actress Joan Crawford, though the origin of her surname Alexander remains unknown to her family.

Alexander's Broadway career included an appearance in the 1936 revue Broadway Sho-Window, and she later appeared on Broadway in Jean Kerr's Poor Richard in 1964.

She is best known for portraying newspaper reporter Lois Lane on the radio serial The Adventures of Superman, a role she performed in more than 1,600 episodes. The series launched in 1940, two years after Superman's debut in DC Comics' Action Comics #1 in June 1938, with the Lois Lane character first appearing in the seventh episode. Though she was not the first actress cast in the role, Alexander joined the series early in its run and became its signature performer as Lane. The show aired from 1940 through 1951, beginning as a syndicated program through WOR in New York, a cornerstone station of the Mutual Broadcasting System, before moving to the full Mutual network and eventually to ABC. Alexander also voiced Lois Lane in the Fleischer Studios and Paramount Pictures animated Superman short films produced in the 1940s, a role she held through the ninth short before Famous Studios assumed production and relocated it to New Jersey. She returned to the character for one season of the 1966 Filmation animated series The New Adventures of Superman.

Beyond her work on Superman, Alexander was heard on several other radio programs, including Dimension X, Philo Vance, Against the Storm, and Perry Mason, on which she originated the role of Della Street, the secretary to defense attorney Perry Mason. She also played Althea on the radio serial The Brighter Day. On television, she served as a regular panelist on the ABC game show The Name's the Same, which ran from 1951 to 1955.

Alexander married actor John Sylvester White in 1944, a union that remained unknown to her family until two years before her death. White later became known for his role as Principal Woodman on Welcome Back, Kotter. Following their divorce, she married surgeon Robert Crowley, with whom she had a daughter, Jane, who became the author and screenwriter Jane Stanton Hitchcock. After that marriage also ended in divorce, Alexander married Arthur Stanton in 1954 or 1955. Stanton was chairman of World-Wide Volkswagen, based in Orangeburg, New York, which served as the distributor of Volkswagen and Audi vehicles in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut and played a role in introducing the Volkswagen Beetle to the United States. Stanton adopted Jane when she was nine years old, and he and Alexander also had two sons together, Adam, who died in 1993, and Timothy. Stanton died on January 20, 1987. The family maintained a Manhattan apartment on the Upper East Side and a home in East Hampton, New York. Their daughter recounted to The New York Times that author George Plimpton proposed to his future wife, Freddy Espy, at a party at their home, that composer Leonard Bernstein sometimes played piano there, and that comedy playwright Neil Simon wrote a sketch for her 21st birthday.

In April 2008, Alexander filed a lawsuit against financial adviser Kenneth I. Starr, alleging that Stanton had left her a $70 million estate which, according to court papers, Starr had used inappropriately and squandered. Alexander died the following year and was survived by her son Timothy Stanton, his wife Agnes Stanton, grandsons Liam and Conrad Stanton, and her daughter Jane Stanton Hitchcock.