Biographie
Joy Bang, a charming and lively blonde actress, perfectly embodied the free-spirited, groovy, and funky hippie girl of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She often portrayed brash young women who were openly and uninhibitedly expressive about their sexuality, delivering her roles with infectious, playful humor. Born Joy Wener on June 15, 1945, in Kansas City, Missouri, she was raised by adoptive parents in New York City. Bang made her film debut in the little-known Separation (1968). Some of her notable roles include one of the main young women in Roger Vadim's Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), a rock groupie in the acclaimed Cisco Pike (1971), Woody Allen's date who is kidnapped by bikers in Play It Again, Sam (1972), and the fed-up girlfriend of a drug dealer played by John Lithgow in Dealing: Or The Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972). Additionally, Bang starred as a naive biology student who encounters a deadly, seductive snake goddess in the unusual Filipino horror film Night of the Cobra Woman (1972) and appeared as a quirky woman attacked in a theater full of zombies in the offbeat horror Messiah of Evil (1974). Beyond films, she appeared in TV commercials and guest-starred on shows such as Police Story (1973), Adam-12 (1968), Room 222 (1969), Medical Center (1969), Hawaii Five-O (1968), and Mission: Impossible (1966). Bang was once romantically linked to Keith Moon, drummer for The Who, and was considered for the lead in the hippie road movie Thumb Tripping (1972), a role that eventually went to Meg Foster. She ceased acting abruptly in the mid-1970s and later pursued a career as a nurse in Minnesota.
