Joan Lazer

Joan Lazer (1936 or 1937 – January 3, 2015) was an American child actress born in Tel Aviv who relocated to New York City at the age of two. She began formal training at age five at a singing and dancing school in Forest Hills, Long Island. A pivotal moment came at age six when she appeared on the children's radio program Coast to Coast on a Bus; though the engagement was intended as a single appearance, she returned to sing on the program weekly for two years. Lazer went on to study at the Professional Children's School, the Lodge Professional School, and later at Actors Studio, Columbia University, and New York University, where she also received private instruction in piano and voice.

Radio became the dominant medium of Lazer's early career. After learning to read scripts, she began auditioning for dramatic radio programs, and her first audition secured her a role on My True Story. Within her first eighteen months working in radio, she accumulated more than 300 appearances across various programs. Her recurring roles on network radio series included Jess on Rosemary, Pixie Jeffreys on Valiant Lady, and Jill on Young Doctor Malone. In 1946, she and Richard Leone — aged nine and eleven, respectively — hosted Milk and Cookies with Jack and Jill on WNEW Radio in New York City, a fifteen-minute Sunday program in which the two discussed world events from a children's perspective. The following year, she recorded a set of four Mother Goose-themed safety jingles for the National Safety Council, initially produced for WNEW and subsequently made available to radio stations and schools nationwide.

Lazer also made recordings aimed at young audiences, among them "Puss In Boots," "Who's Who at the Zoo," and "Come to the Fair," the last of which was recorded for the Children's Record Guild. She was a member of a stock company assembled by Tone Products Corporation specifically to produce children's recordings.

On Broadway, Lazer portrayed Rosie Goldberg in Me and Molly in 1948. That same year she appeared on film in Undercover Man, playing a child of the slums in a role that required her to learn portions of her dialogue in Italian. Her television credits included The Further Adventures of Ellery Queen, American Inventory, Treasury Men in Action, and Stage 13.

Lazer expressed a clear preference for radio over other performance mediums, noting that she learned more from it and found the variety of doing a different show each week more stimulating than repeating the same production nightly. She died on January 3, 2015, following a seven-year illness with cancer.