Biography
Jane Kean, a charming and lively honey-blonde performer, enjoyed a career spanning more than sixty years in vaudeville, radio, Broadway, nightclubs, Las Vegas showrooms, TV variety shows, and occasional films. Born April 10, 1923, in Hartford, Connecticut, Jane’s parents separated when she was young. Encouraged by her mother to pursue performing arts, the family relocated to New York. Her older sister, Betty Kean (1914-1986), quickly found success in show business, and Jane followed her lead.
Jane began her professional stage career in "Hi Ya, Gentlemen!" at the Colonial Theatre in Boston. She made her film debut in the Republic musical Sailors on Leave (1941), starring William Lundigan and Shirley Ross, and appeared in Flying with Music (1942) before focusing mainly on live theater. Her Broadway debut came in the Fats Waller musical "Early to Bed" with Richard Kollmar in 1943. She went on to star in "The Girl from Nantucket" (1945) and later joined the cast of "Call Me Mister" as a replacement.
After these successes, Jane and Betty formed a popular nightclub act, "Betty & Jane Kean," blending singing, dancing, and broad comedy. They also appeared together on Broadway in "Along Fifth Avenue" (1949), starring Jackie Gleason, and "Ankles Aweigh" (1955), featuring Betty’s third husband, Lew Parker, who later gained fame as Marlo Thomas’s father on That Girl (1966). The sisters appeared on TV variety shows like "The Ed Sullivan Show" and "The Jackie Gleason Show," and toured with their vaudeville act both domestically and internationally, including a 1956 engagement at the London Palladium.
Betty, previously married to comedian Frank Fay and actor Jim Backus before marrying Parker, and Jane eventually pursued separate careers. Having worked with Jackie Gleason on vaudeville and musicals during the 1940s and 1950s, Jane was invited to join "The Honeymooners" cast as Trixie Norton when the show was revived as a sketch segment on "The Jackie Gleason Show" in 1966. Alongside Sheila MacRae as Alice Kramden and Art Carney as Ed Norton, the segment was filmed in Miami Beach and later expanded into an hour-long format featuring musical numbers.
Jane’s stage credits include roles in "The Pajama Game," "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?" (where she replaced Jayne Mansfield), "The Mind with the Dirty Man," "Light Up the Sky," "Last of the Red Hot Lovers," "Carnival," "Follies," and "70 Girls 70." On television, she guest-starred on popular shows such as "The Danny Thomas Show," "The Lucy Show," "Love, American Style," "The Dean Martin Show," "Cannon," "The Love Boat," "The Facts of Life," "Growing Pains," "Dallas," "Dream On," and the soaps "Days of Our Lives" and "General Hospital." She also lent her voice to films and commercials, notably as Belle in the animated holiday classic Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol (1962), and in the hybrid live-action/animated film Pete’s Dragon (1977), starring Helen Reddy and Jim Dale. In later years, she performed in dinner theaters, on college campuses, and aboard cruise ships.
Remaining active throughout her life, Jane appeared in her one-woman show "An Evening with Jane Kean" in 2012 at age 89, humorously dubbing herself the "Lady Gaga of the Stone Age." She authored a memoir titled "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to The Honeymooners... I Had a Life." One of her final roles was voicing Aunt Ida in the animated feature Dose Hermanos: Shadow of the Invisible Man (1999). Jane Kean passed away in Burbank, California, on November 26, 2013, at age 90, following a stroke after a fall at her Toluca Lake home. She was married twice—first to Richard Linkroum (1962-1969) and later to her manager Joe Hecht, who died in 2006. Both marriages were childless.
