Acting
Community Rating
5.7
TMDB estimate
Born
December 26, 1929
Died
April 23, 2017 (age 87)
Betty Jane Kathleen Crowley (born December 26, 1931) was an American actress and was Miss New Jersey in 1949 and a contestant for Miss America in the same year (she came in sixth). After the pageants, she became an actress who specialized in being phenomenally seductive in TV series and movies. Most well known for playing a variety of sirens in TV's Maverick (1957) opposite James Garner, Jack Kelly, and Roger Moore, she appears in eight episodes, a series record for leading ladies; "The Jeweled Gun" (with Jack Kelly), "Maverick Springs" (with James Garner and Jack Kelly), "The Misfortune Teller" (with Garner), "A Bullet for the Teacher" (with Roger Moore), "Kiz" (with Moore), and "Dade City Dodge," "The Troubled Heir," and "One of Our Trains Is Missing," with Kelly. Crowley made 81 television appearances on various series and appeared in twenty movies between 1951 and 1970 (one of her last movie roles was in Downhill Racer with Robert Redford). Many of her films were low-budget sci-fi and horror movies, but she seemed to appear in practically every narrative television series produced in the late '50s and '60s, including Bourbon Street Beat, Surfside 6, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Bat Masterson, Bonanza, Branded, My Three Sons, Donna Reed, Perry Mason, Checkmate, Bronco, Route 66, Thriller, Batman, Disneyland, Family Affair, Rawhide, The Lone Ranger, and many others. Crowley was often confused with her acting contemporary Pat Crowley (frequently billed as "Patricia Crowley"), who appeared as guest leading lady in different episodes of many of the same television series and was not related. The two Crowleys were apparently never cast in the same episode. In the Philip Roth novel American Pastoral, the protagonist marries Miss New Jersey 1949, in the book named Dawn Dwyer and having few similarities to Crowley's post-Miss New Jersey life (including a poorer finish in the Miss America pageant). Description above from the Wikipedia article Kathleen Crowley, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

The Lawyer
as Alice Fiske
1970

Downhill Racer
as American Newspaper Woman
1969

The High Chaparral
as Countess Maria Kettenden von München
1967

Family Affair
1966

Batman
as Sophia Starr
1966

Gidget
1965

Branded
1965

Redigo
1963

Showdown
as Estelle
1963

FBI Code 98
as Marian Nichols
1963

The Virginian
as Jennifer McLeod
1962

The Americans
1961

Route 66
1960

Surfside 6
1960

Checkmate
as Pauline Spencer
1960

Thriller
as Dr. Lois Walker
1960

Curse of the Undead
as Dolores Carter
1959

Hawaiian Eye
1959

Bourbon Street Beat
1959

Bonanza
as Kathleen aka Quick-Buck Kate
1959