Joan Darling

Joan Darling, born Joan Kugell on April 14, 1935, in Newton, Massachusetts, is an American actress, television and film director, and dramatic arts instructor. The eldest of four children born to Helen Kerner and attorney Simon Harris Kugell — who founded the Boston University Law Review — she grew up in the neighboring town of Brookline and attended Brookline High School before going on to study at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and the University of Texas.

Her performing career began in earnest between 1955 and at least 1958, when she appeared with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, earning recognition from audiences and critics for the range and quality of her work. That engagement brought her a 1956 scholarship from the Beta Sigma Phi sorority. Her first marriage, to physicist Robert Klein, began in 1954 and ended two years later. She subsequently married folksinger Erik Darling on September 28, 1958; though that marriage also ended in divorce after roughly five years, she retained his surname professionally. Since 1966, she has been married to Bill Svanoe, a former bandmate of Erik Darling in The Rooftop Singers who later became a writer and professor at UNC-Chapel Hill.

In November 1960, Darling joined the New York improvisational theater troupe The Premise Players, which served as a springboard to off-Broadway and Broadway work. She made her feature film debut in The Troublemaker (1964), directed by fellow Premise player Theodore J. Flicker, and later appeared in Flicker's The President's Analyst (1967). Her Broadway career included appearances in 1967 in A Minor Adjustment and Leda Had a Little Swan. During the 1970s, she became a series regular on the legal drama Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law, playing the office secretary opposite Arthur Hill, Lee Majors, Reni Santoni, and David Soul.

Darling transitioned into directing in the 1970s and became a pioneering figure in the field. She was the first woman nominated for an Emmy Award for directing, ultimately receiving four nominations and winning one. She also received two Directors Guild of America nominations, winning one. Among her most celebrated directorial credits is the "Chuckles Bites the Dust" episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, which earned her a 1976 Emmy nomination for Outstanding Directing in a Comedy Series. She also directed "The Nurses" episode of M*A*S*H, which brought her a 1977 Emmy nomination in the same category. Her television directing credits span Rhoda, Doc, Taxi, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, The Bionic Woman, Hizzonner, Magnum P.I., Steven Spielberg's Amazing Stories, Phyllis, and Doogie Howser M.D., among others. In 1976, she directed the feature film First Love, becoming part of a small group of women to direct a major Hollywood studio feature at that time. She followed that with The Check Is in the Mail (1986) and several television movies.

As a performer, Darling received an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of Dorothy Parker in Woven in a Crazy Plaid. In December 1987, she appeared in an episode of Jake and the Fatman in which her character was given the name Joan Kugell, her own birth name, as an apparent inside reference to her career.