Phyllis Crane: A nice little cutie, with great legs in Pop Goes The Easel. I wonder what happened to her after 1936.
Phyllis Crane has always been a favorite of mine, too, and I also wish she'd appeared in more Stooges shorts.
Regarding what ever happened to her after 1936 I had wondered about that, too...ever since the 1970's! That's when I started researching her life & career. Continued research (much pre-internet) since that time has revealed much about her which I plan to cover in a future Three Stooges Journal article.
I was even given a large collection by one of Phyllis' step-daughters about 15 years ago of one-of-a-kind family photos and rare stills, many with descriptions and captions written on them by Phyllis herself. They range from wonderful stills of her posing in Vaudeville at age 8 all the way up to 1982, the year she died. Also a fascinating scrapbook on Phyllis' career from the mid-1920's through 1934 kept by her mother.
But basically here's some of what happened to her after 1936:
She gave up Hollywood in 1937 after increasingly smaller roles in films, moved east to try her luck there, and appeared in one east-coast-produced Vitaphone short. It's still not clear exactly what she was up to beween about 1938 and 1947 but I have numerous portraits she had taken during that time that look like head-shots for potential acting or modeling jobs. No further acting jobs are known, at least not in films. Anyway, about 1948 she met a married man with two daughters. He divorced his wife, married Phyllis, and reportedly all remained friends. Phyllis remained happily married to him and raised the two step-daughters. They divided their time between homes in New York and Florida until her death in 1982. Her husband who was older than she, outlived her by a few years.
Apparently Phyllis rarely spoke of her movie days to her family. In fact it wasn't until I sent copies of some of Phyllis' comedies to her step-daughters that they discovered how funny she could be. One of them wrote to me in an October 3, 1996 letter about the videos:
"As she never spoke of those days I was amazed to see what a comic flare she had. I would have loved to have heard stories of Moe, Larry and Curly. It must have been a riot on those sets... My sons can't believe Phyllis was so silly as she was a very humorless Grandmother and like W.C. Fields didn't like children!"
She went on to say about "Phyl" (as they called her): "Through the years she was very good to me and stood by me during some very bad times, much more so than my father!"
She said that her favorite among the videos of Phyllis' comedies that I sent her was her role in the 1936 Buster Keaton short THREE ON A LIMB.
