Joan Hotchkis

Joan Hotchkis (September 21, 1927 – September 27, 2022) was an American actress, writer, and performance artist who worked across stage, screen, and television. A lifetime member of both the Actors Studio and the Dramatists Guild, she appeared on Broadway between 1960 and 1961 and built a career spanning several decades in multiple disciplines.

Hotchkis was born in Los Angeles and raised in San Marino, California. Her father, Preston, worked in insurance and investment, while her mother, Katharine (Bixby), came from a family that operated Rancho Los Alamitos as a 26,000-acre cattle ranch in Orange County. She attended Westridge School in Pasadena and went on to earn a Bachelor of Arts from Smith College in 1949. She subsequently completed a master's degree in Early Childhood Education at Bank Street Teachers College and spent three years teaching nursery school and kindergarten before transitioning to acting at age 26.

After joining the Actors Studio and training in New York City, Hotchkis made her Broadway debut in Advise and Consent, adapted from the novel of the same name. She also appeared in the Broadway production of Write Me a Murder, and was featured in Philadelphia previews of It's a Bird It's a Plane It's Superman. In the early 1960s she played Myra on the soap opera The Secret Storm for several years. She married Robert Foster in June 1958, the two having met while filming a live commercial; they had one daughter, Paula, and divorced in 1967, after which Hotchkis relocated to Los Angeles.

Working steadily in television through the 1970s, Hotchkis became particularly recognized for her recurring role as Dr. Nancy Cunningham, the sometime girlfriend of Oscar Madison, on the television version of The Odd Couple. She also appeared as Ellen in the Emmy-winning series My World and Welcome to It, and made guest appearances on programs including Bewitched, St. Elsewhere, Lou Grant, Charlie's Angels, Mannix, Marcus Welby, and Barnaby Jones. On film, she co-starred as Mama Hartley in Ode to Billy Joe (1976).

Hotchkis began writing her own material in the 1970s, creating a one-woman play titled Legacy, which depicted an upper-class housewife experiencing a mental and emotional breakdown. Eric Morris directed the stage production, and director Karen Arthur subsequently proposed a film adaptation, with Hotchkis serving as writer, producer, and star. The resulting film, Legacy (1975), won Best Newcomer at the Tehran Film Festival. That same decade, Hotchkis co-wrote with Morris the acting manual No Acting Please (1977), which continued to be used in colleges and conservatories.

In the early 1980s she returned to regional theater, performing at institutions including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Milwaukee Repertory Theater, and later starred in The Glass Menagerie at Los Angeles Theater Center. Beginning in the late 1980s, Hotchkis founded the Santa Monica-based Tearsheets Productions and created two solo performance works. The first, Tearsheets: Rude Tales from the Ranch, toured the United States in the early 1990s and traveled to the Edinburgh International Festival Fringe, where it became the only American production to receive a Fringe First Award. Her second solo piece, Elements of Flesh: Or Screwing Saved My Ass, was performed in 1996 and addressed themes of aging and sexuality.

Outside of her performing career, Hotchkis pursued a longstanding interest in psychology, eventually working part-time as a paraprofessional in aggression training at the Institute of Group Psychotherapy under the mentorship of George Bach. She died on September 27, 2022, in Los Angeles at the age of 95, having suffered from congestive heart failure.