Joan Lee

Joan Boocock Lee (5 February 1922 – 6 July 2017) was a British-born actress, hat model, and novelist whose career spanned stage, animation, and film across several decades. She was born in Gosforth, Newcastle, in the Castle Ward Rural District of Northumberland, where her birth was registered in the first quarter of 1922. Her father, Norman Dunton Boocock, had married her mother, Hannah Clayton, in the Castle Ward district in 1920. Lee grew up in Gosforth and Fawdon before relocating to the United States after World War II as a war bride, having married American serviceman Sanford Dorf Weiss in 1943 after knowing him for only 24 hours. The couple separated not long after, and Lee went on to establish herself as a hat model in New York City.

Her Broadway career began in 1943, when she appeared in the musical Lady in the Dark. During this period she was working as a hat model at a New York modeling agency, a position that would lead to a significant personal turning point. Stan Lee's cousin had arranged a blind date for him with a different model at the agency where Joan worked. When he arrived, Joan answered the door instead, and he immediately told her he had been drawing her face since childhood. After two weeks of dating he proposed, and Joan traveled to Reno, Nevada, to nullify her previous marriage. On 5 December 1947, she received an annulment and married Stan Lee in the room next door that same day.

The couple had two daughters: Joan Celia, known as J.C., born in 1950, and Jan Lee, who died three days after delivery in 1953. In 1949 they purchased a two-story, three-bedroom home in Woodmere, Long Island, where they lived through 1952. As an interfaith couple they faced difficulty adopting in subsequent years. Stan Lee credited Joan as an inspiration for early incarnations of the Fantastic Four, and she also served as the inspiration for Gwen Stacy, Spider-Man's second girlfriend in the comics.

In 1981, the couple relocated from New York City to Los Angeles, where Joan pursued a career in voice acting. She first appeared in the Fantastic Four animated series in 1994, voicing a recurring character. That same year she voiced a computer in the Iron Man television series across three episodes. From 1996 to 1998 she appeared in eight episodes of the Spider-Man animated series as Madame Web. In 2002 she appeared as herself alongside Stan Lee and Kevin Smith in Stan Lee's Mutants, Monsters & Marvels, and the following year she appeared as herself in the documentary Comic Book Superheroes Unmasked. In 2010 she was featured in With Great Power: The Stan Lee Story, a documentary about her husband. Her final screen appearance was a cameo alongside Stan Lee in the 2016 film X-Men: Apocalypse.

Beyond performing, Lee authored the novel The Pleasure Palace in 1987. Her daughter has noted that Joan also completed three additional novels that were never published. Lee died on 6 July 2017, in Los Angeles from stroke-related complications, with her husband of nearly 70 years and their daughter Joan at her bedside.