Shirley Jones

Shirley Mae Jones (born March 31, 1934) is an American actress and singer. In her six decades in show business, she has starred as wholesome characters in a number of musical films, such as Oklahoma! (1955), Carousel (1956), and The Music Man (1962). She won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for playing a vengeful prostitute in Elmer Gantry (1960).

She played the lead role of Shirley Partridge, the widowed mother of five children, in the musical situation-comedy television series The Partridge Family (1970–1974), which co-starred her real-life stepson, David Cassidy, son of Jack Cassidy.

Jones was born on March 31, 1934, in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, to Methodist parents Marjorie (née Williams), and Paul Jones, owner of the Jones Brewing Company. Jones' paternal grandfather came from Wales. She was named after child star Shirley Temple.

Jones says that many people have incorrectly assumed that her middle name referred to vaudeville and film legend Mae West, but Jones was actually named after her aunt. Coincidentally, the first star Jones ever met was West, who was performing at the Twin Coaches supper club in Rostraver around 1954.

The Jones family later moved to the small nearby town of Smithton. Jones began singing at the age of six in the Methodist Church choir and took voice lessons from Ralph Lewando. While attending South Huntingdon High School in Ruffs Dale, she participated in school plays.

Jones won the Miss Pittsburgh contest in 1952.

Her first audition was for an open bi-weekly casting call held by John Fearnley, casting director for Rodgers and Hammerstein and their various musicals. At the time, Jones had never heard of Rodgers and Hammerstein. Fearnley was so impressed, he ran across the street to fetch Richard Rodgers, who was rehearsing with an orchestra for an upcoming musical. Rodgers then called Oscar Hammerstein at home.

The two saw great potential in Jones. She became the first and only singer to be put under personal contract with the songwriters. They first cast her in a minor role in South Pacific. For her second Broadway show, Me and Juliet, she started as a chorus girl, and then an understudy for the lead role, earning rave reviews in Chicago, Illinois.

Jones impressed Rodgers and Hammerstein with her musically trained voice. She was cast as the female lead in the film adaptation Oklahoma! in 1955. Other film musicals quickly followed, including Carousel (1956), April Love (1957), and The Music Man (1962), in which she was often typecast as a wholesome, kind character.

She won a 1960 Academy Award for her performance in Elmer Gantry portraying a woman corrupted by the title character played by Burt Lancaster. Her character becomes a prostitute who encounters her seducer years later and reveals his true character. The director, Richard Brooks, had originally fought against her being in the movie, but after seeing her first scene, told her she would win an Oscar for her performance. She was reunited with Ron Howard (who had played her brother in The Music Man) in The Courtship of Eddie's Father (1963). With an uncharacteristically brunette hairstyle, Jones played the role of a woman who falls in love with Tony Randall's lion-owning professor in Fluffy (1965).

In her film career, she has worked with some of Hollywood's icons: Jimmy Stewart, Gene Kelly, Marlon Brando, James Cagney, Henry Fonda, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and director John Ford.

In 1970, after turning down the role of Carol Brady on The Brady Bunch, a role that ultimately went to her best friend, Florence Henderson, Jones was the producers' first choice to audition for the lead role of Shirley Partridge in The Partridge Family, an ABC musical sitcom based loosely on the real-life musical family The Cowsills. The series focused on a young widowed mother whose five children form a pop-rock group after the entire family painted its signature bus to travel. She was convinced that the combination of music and comedy would be a surefire hit.

The problem with Partridge—though it was great for me and gave me an opportunity to stay home and raise my kids—when my agents came to me and presented it to me, they said if you do a series and it becomes a hit show, you will be that character for the rest of your life and your film career will go into the toilet, which is what happened. But I have no regrets.

In 1975, Jones starred in Winner Take All as a compulsive gambler who wrecks her marriage by stealing from her husband and by eventually cheating on him with her bookie. In 1979, Jones tried her hand at television for the second time, starring in the NBC show Shirley, which, like The Partridge Family, featured a family headed by a widowed mother. It failed to win ratings and was cancelled toward the middle of the season. Jones also played the "older woman" girlfriend of Drew Carey's character in several episodes of The Drew Carey Show. She reprised Shirley Partridge in a cameo in a 2000 episode of That '70s Show.

She was also in the dramatic project There Were Times, Dear, in which she played a loyal wife whose husband is dying of Alzheimer's disease. She was nominated for an Emmy Award for this work.

In February 1986, Jones unveiled her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Vine Street just around the corner from Hollywood Boulevard.

In 1983, she appeared in a rare revival of Noël Coward's operetta, Bitter Sweet. In 2004, she returned to Broadway in a revival of 42nd Street, portraying diva Dorothy Brock opposite Patrick Cassidy, the first time a mother and son were known to star together on Broadway. In July 2005, Jones revisited the musical Carousel onstage in Massachusetts, portraying "Cousin Nettie".

Jones appeared as aunt of a struggling widow during the Great Depression, in Hallmark Channel's Hidden Places in 2006. She received an Emmy Award nomination for Supporting Actress, Miniseries or Movie, and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Actress in a Movie or Miniseries. She also appeared in Grandma's Boy (2006) as a nymphomaniac senior citizen.

On August 5, 1956, Jones married actor and singer Jack Cassidy. They had three sons, Shaun, Patrick, and Ryan. David Cassidy was Jack's son from his first marriage to actress Evelyn Ward and became her stepson. Jones divorced Cassidy in 1975.

Cassidy died in a fire on December 12, 1976. Jack "wanted to come back (to me) right up to the day he died", Jones said in a 1983 newspaper interview. "And as I realized later, I wanted him. That's the terrible part. Much as I love Marty and have a wonderful relationship—I'd say this with Marty sitting here—I'm not sure if Jack were alive I'd be married to Marty." Jones was 20 years old when she met Cassidy, and she refers to him as the most influential person in and the love of her life.