Juleen Compton

Juleen Compton, born in 1933 in Phoenix, Arizona, is an American actor, writer, director, and independent filmmaker. She trained under Lee Strasberg and built a career that spanned stage, screen, and theater administration across several decades.

Compton's stage work began in the mid-1950s. In 1955 she appeared in a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, and in 1957 she originated the role of Fredrica in John Patrick's Broadway comedy Good as Gold, performing alongside Roddy McDowall and Zero Mostel. In 1959 she played Myrrhina in a production of Lysistrata that reopened the East 74th Street Theater, a venue she had previously owned. The following year she took the title role in a production of Jean Anouilh's Jeannette.

Her work as an independent filmmaker produced two notable features. She wrote, directed, financed, starred in, and distributed Stranded in 1965. The following year she wrote, directed, and financed The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean, which received a special award at Cannes, an award at the San Francisco Film Festival, and a screening at MoMA in 1970. In February 2022, TIFF's Bell Lightbox Theater screened The Plastic Dome of Norma Jean as the first entry in its Midnight Madness series following closure during the coronavirus pandemic. The UCLA Film and Television Archive has compared her filmmaking to the French New Wave, and in a 2019 piece for The New Yorker, critic Richard Brody wrote that with Stranded, Compton places herself in a tradition of director-stars that includes Charlie Chaplin, Erich von Stroheim, Orson Welles, and Jacques Tati, as well as Jean Seberg, Shirley MacLaine, and Judy Garland.

Beyond her two features, Compton's writing credits include the television movies Virginia Hill (1974), starring Dyan Cannon and Harvey Keitel, and Women at West Point (1979). Her directing credits include Buckeye and Blue (1988). A script she wrote entitled Two Nice Girls is held among a New York Public Library collection of scripts produced, co-produced, or sponsored by the New York Shakespeare Festival between 1972 and 1992. She also began work on a documentary about the history of women directors in Hollywood called Women in Action, though no completed version has been located. In 1974 she participated in the first Directing Workshop for Women at the American Film Institute.

In the 1990s Compton relocated to New York City to run the Century Center for the Performing Arts, an off-Broadway theater company. Her earlier real estate activity in the city had been extensive: a 1961 New York Times profile noted her acquisition of a $250,000 building on West Thirteenth Street, which she planned to convert into a complex housing theaters, a drama school, and a restaurant. A 1980 New York Times article on architecture reported that she owned a movie theater at 350 East 72nd Street and that architect Philip Birnbaum was working on a project for her.

Compton was married to director and drama critic Harold Clurman, who had also served as her acting teacher, from 1960 until his death in 1980, though a 1979 New York Times interview noted uncertainty about the legal status of their divorce. A biography of actress Stella Adler, Clurman's first wife, states that Compton never filed divorce papers and consequently inherited certain rights to his writings.

In December 2019, Mexico's Museo Nacional de Arte acquired a 1956 portrait of Compton painted by Diego Rivera, donated by Compton and her husband Nicholas Wentworth. Mexican newspaper Excélsior reported the possibility that a second Rivera portrait of Compton exists. A 1970 New York Times interview noted that across her many changes of residence, Compton retained two objects: the Rivera portrait and a bust of her by sculptor Jacob Epstein. A 2019 Metrograph blog post by critic Kristen Yoonsoo Kim reported that little is known about Compton's current life, that she is said to live in the Hamptons under the name Justine, and that she had reportedly attended previous Metrograph screenings of her films without identifying herself.