Joan McCracken

Joan Hume McCracken (December 31, 1917 – November 1, 1961) was an American dancer and actress born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Mary Humes and Franklin T. McCracken, a sportswriter at the Philadelphia Public Ledger who specialized in golf and boxing. Her Broadway career spanned from 1943 to 1958, and she became recognized as an innovator in combining dance with comedy before branching into dramatic acting and early television work.

McCracken began her dance training in Philadelphia, earning a scholarship for acrobatic work at age eleven and later studying with Catherine Littlefield. In 1934, she left West Philadelphia High School in the tenth grade to study in New York with choreographer George Balanchine at the newly opened School of American Ballet. She returned to Philadelphia the following year to join Littlefield's newly formed Littlefield Ballet, later known as the Philadelphia Ballet, as one of its principal soloists. In 1937, she traveled with the company on a European tour — the first such tour undertaken by an American ballet company in Europe — though the demands of the trip strained her health. McCracken had recently been diagnosed with type I diabetes, then called juvenile diabetes, and the tour made it difficult to maintain her treatment regimen. She kept the diagnosis secret throughout her life to protect her career, though the disease caused fainting spells and eventually led to serious complications.

In 1940, McCracken and her first husband, dancer Jack Dunphy, relocated to New York City. After an initial period without work, she danced with the Radio City Music Hall ballet company and later with the ballet company at Jacob's Pillow in Massachusetts. She subsequently joined the Dance Players, a company formed by choreographer Eugene Loring, where Michael Kidd served as Loring's assistant and leading male dancer. In 1942, both McCracken and Dunphy auditioned successfully for the dance ensemble of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical then titled Away We Go, choreographed by Agnes de Mille. During out-of-town tryouts in early 1943, McCracken distinguished herself from the chorus, developing a comic pratfall in the "Many a New Day" number for the role of Sylvie. By the time the production opened on Broadway under the title Oklahoma!, she had become known as "The Girl Who Fell Down," and the carefully constructed fall made her an immediate sensation. Whether the idea originated with McCracken or with de Mille has been disputed; cast member Celeste Holm attributed it to composer Richard Rodgers.

Her performance in Oklahoma! led to a contract with Warner Brothers, which cast her in the 1944 film Hollywood Canteen, an all-star production in which contract players portrayed themselves. McCracken appeared in a specialty number called "Ballet in Jive" that received favorable critical notice. Despite her initial enthusiasm, she grew disillusioned with the studio environment, citing the patronizing tone of the film and the lack of guidance from choreographer LeRoy Prinz, and she broke her contract to return to Broadway. She appeared in Bloomer Girl in 1944, a musical set during the Civil War widely regarded as the first Broadway musical to address feminism. Her performance, particularly the satiric number "T'morra, T'morra," reinforced her reputation as a comic performer who could integrate acting with dance.

McCracken starred in Billion Dollar Baby, which opened on Broadway in December 1945. Though she received positive personal notices, the show itself drew only lukewarm reviews. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer subsequently hired her for the 1947 college musical Good News, starring June Allyson and Peter Lawford, in which she played Babe Doolittle. Her song-and-dance number "Pass That Peace Pipe" was a standout, but MGM did not renew her contract, and her film career did not advance further. Film historian Jeanine Basinger, in The Star Machine, contrasted McCracken with Debbie Reynolds, noting that unlike Reynolds, who was a novice groomed by MGM, McCracken was a Broadway veteran whose hard-edged stage delivery and lack of close-up appeal worked against her on screen.

Determined to develop as a dramatic actress, McCracken began studying acting in 1947 with Bobby Lewis, a Group Theatre alumnus who would soon co-found the Actors Studio with Elia Kazan and Cheryl Crawford. That fall, at Lewis's invitation, she became one of the Studio's charter members. She also studied with Sanford Meisner and Herbert Berghof at the Neighborhood Playhouse. A turning point came in December 1947 when she appeared as Virginia, Galileo's daughter, in the New York production of Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, starring Charles Laughton and directed by Joseph Losey — a straight dramatic role with no dancing that helped establish her credibility as a serious actress. In 1949, she appeared in the Broadway production of Clifford Odets's The Big Knife, directed by Lee Strasberg.

McCracken's Broadway credits also included Me and Juliet, The Infernal Machine, Angel in the Pawnshop, and Dance Me a Song, the last of which opened in 1950. She was generous in supporting other performers, including Shirley MacLaine, whom she helped promote early in her career. MacLaine described her as a small but powerful woman with a foghorn voice. McCracken's second husband was choreographer Bob Fosse, whom she encouraged to pursue choreography. She was also among the real-life figures credited as partial inspirations for the character of Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's; Capote was a personal friend. Complications from diabetes curtailed her career several years before her death on November 1, 1961, at the age of forty-three.