Joel Ashley

Joel Thomas Ashley (April 7, 1919 – April 7, 2000) was an American actor who worked across stage, screen, and radio. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, he was the son of actress and script supervisor Beulah Ashley, née Rodgers, and never knew his father. Much of his childhood was spent at military boarding schools, including Georgia Military Academy, Peekskill Military Academy, and Black-Foxe Military Institute, or with his mother's family in Macon, Georgia.

Around 1934 or early 1935, following the marriage of his aunt, actress Barbara Rogers, to Warner Brothers executive William Koenig, Beulah relocated with her son to Los Angeles. Shortly after his sixteenth birthday, Ashley made his stage debut at Hollywood Military Academy, playing Jim Hunter in Aunt Julia's Pearls, a three-act comedy by Hope Hearn Moulton. The Rogers-Koenig connection appears to have opened doors at Warner Brothers for both mother and son: Beulah contributed rewrites to the James Cagney film G Men, while Ashley worked as a stunt double on Captain Blood, the Errol Flynn vehicle directed by Michael Curtiz. According to an anecdote later recounted by Richmond Independent entertainment writer L. L. Stevenson, Ashley had been employed at the studio as an electrician when he slid down a rope and landed practically in Curtiz's lap; the director, who had been searching for actors capable of working the ship's rigging, promptly cast him. By Ashley's own account, his film appearances during this Hollywood period totaled roughly twenty and consisted largely of stunt work. Among the titles in which his presence received at least passing press notice were the musical comedy Top of the Town (1937), the romantic drama I Met My Love Again (1938), and the adventure comedy Girl from Havana (1940). He also worked in radio during this period, appearing in August 1937 on KMTR in Los Angeles in the short playlet "Interference."

In June 1938, after visiting his grandparents in Macon, Ashley moved to New York, where he pursued summer stock work and enrolled at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. He also gained his first exposure to Broadway during this time, carrying a spear in Kaufman and Hart's The American Way, starring Frederic March and Florence Eldridge. To support himself, he worked as a stevedore and as a model for John Robert Powers. After graduating from the AADA in 1940, Ashley joined the newly formed Hollywood Group Theater, which included playwright Alfred Gehri, musical director Lou Halmy, art director Pierre Marquet, and actors Judith Allen, Sig Arno, Iphigenie Castigliani, Ann Lee, and Ernő Verebes. The company's inaugural production, presented on June 3, was the American debut of Gehri's Sixth Floor, a French Grand Hotel-style work set in a Montmartre rooming house, in which Ashley was described as debonairly handsome in the role of the gay Lothario.

That summer Ashley began a stateside stint with the United States Marines, which was cut short around August 1941 by a freak injury that damaged his knees and resulted in an honorable discharge. By December of that year he had secured a small role in playwright Myron Fagan's To Live Again, which opened December 29 at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles. He then spent a fourteen-week summer stock season beginning in June 1942 at Baltimore's Vagabond Theater, where wartime conditions had created a shortage of qualified performers and Ashley became the resident leading man. His wife, Margalo Wilson, was also a member of the company. The season opened with Noël Coward's Fallen Angels, in which Ashley played Frederick Sterroll.

In December 1942, Ashley made his Broadway debut in The Sun Field, a comedy adapted by Milton Lazarus from Heywood Broun's 1923 novel of the same name. He played "Tiny" Tyler, an unschooled but quick-study star ballplayer, alongside Claudia Morgan. Although his performance was well received, the adaptation itself was not, and the production closed after five performances — even before Variety could publish its opening night review, which it ran nonetheless, as the trade paper noted, for the record. Ashley returned to Broadway in 1943 with the drama War President, and in 1944 with Catherine Was Great, a play in which he appeared opposite Mae West. His stage work during this period also included a touring production of Margaret Vale's The Two Mrs. Carrolls, in which he played the morbid artist husband opposite Elisabeth Bergner. Globe and Mail critic Colin Sabiston, while centering his praise on Bergner, described Ashley's portrayal as a really masterly piece of work.

During the run of The Two Mrs. Carrolls tour, The Hollywood Reporter announced Ashley as a cast member of Purgatory Street, a Universal International adaptation of a novel by mystery writer Roman McDougald, to be directed by Sam Wood. After roughly six months of related coverage, Wood announced in December that he was abandoning the project due to casting difficulties, and Ashley's anticipated screen debut did not materialize. In September 1949, he was set to appear alongside Kay Francis on the television series Chevrolet Tele-Theater, which would simultaneously have marked Francis's TV debut, but Francis withdrew at the last minute on her physician's orders and Ashley followed. His actual television debut came the following February on the recently converted radio series Lights Out.

Ashley's stage range extended well beyond leading man assignments. His roles included Abraham Lincoln, Frankenstein's monster, Prince Potemkin, and Joe Webber, the semi-autobiographical protagonist of Thomas Wolfe's The Web and the Rock. Variety's critic Russ rated his portrayal of Webber the top performance of his career, noting that Ashley, having been typecast for several seasons as the pleasant leading man opposite female stars, took full advantage of the opportunity to play an egotistical, petulant, selfish, childish, and bewildered novelist, with his strongest scene coming near the play's close as the character articulates his inner struggles. Among the leading women opposite whom Ashley worked were Mae West, Elisabeth Bergner, and Kay Francis, with whom he was associated for an extended period.

His screen career from 1950 to 1960 consisted primarily of minor roles, frequently uncredited and often in westerns, in which he was regularly cast as a villain. His final feature film appearance came in the 1959 western Warlock, in which he played Murch as a last-minute replacement following the October 1958 plane crash that killed character actor Ed Hinton. His final screen credit came in 1967.