Joan Lowell

Joan Lowell was born in Berkeley on November 23rd, 1902, as Helen Wagner. Her film career began in 1919 at Goldwyn Studios, where she worked as an extra. She can be spotted in Souls for Sale (1923), a delightful comedy-drama about the movie business. After Souls for Sale, Joan appeared in a handful of films, and her career seemed to be going places. In 1925 an uncredited Joan plays a friend of the film's heroine in Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush . This was Joan Lowell's last film work for...See more

Joan Lowell was born in Berkeley on November 23rd, 1902, as Helen Wagner. Her film career began in 1919 at Goldwyn Studios, where she worked as an extra. She can be spotted in Souls for Sale (1923), a delightful comedy-drama about the movie business. After Souls for Sale, Joan appeared in a handful of films, and her career seemed to be going places. In 1925 an uncredited Joan plays a friend of the film's heroine in Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush . This was Joan Lowell's last film work for almost a decade. In 1927, she married playwright Thompson Buchanan, but the marriage barely lasted two years. After divorcing Buchanan, she penned her infamous 'autobiography', Cradle of the Deep , a Book of the Month club selection that shifted over 100,000 copies. D. W. Griffith was eager to produce a big screen adaptation of Cradle , but when the truth came out, his plans went by the wayside. Joan later sold the film rights to tiny Van Beuren Studios. The result was 1934's Adventure Girl , an outrageous road-show feature shot on location in Guatemala. Joan narrates and appears on screen as a feisty gal eager to plunge into the jungles of Central America in search of lost cities and forgotten treasures. Aside from her film career, Joan Lowell worked as a tabloid reporter and continued to write books--including Reporter Gal (1933) and Promised Land (1952). In addition to writing, she ran a large coffee plantation in Brazil from 1936 until her death in 1967. See less