Biography
Betty Jane Kathleen Crowley (born December 26, 1931) was an American actress and was Miss New Jersey in 1949 and a contestant for Miss America in the same year (she came in sixth). After the pageants, she became an actress who specialized in being phenomenally seductive in TV series and movies. Most well known for playing a variety of sirens in TV's Maverick (1957) opposite James Garner, Jack Kelly, and Roger Moore, she appears in eight episodes, a series record for leading ladies; "The Jeweled Gun" (with Jack Kelly), "Maverick Springs" (with James Garner and Jack Kelly), "The Misfortune Teller" (with Garner), "A Bullet for the Teacher" (with Roger Moore), "Kiz" (with Moore), and "Dade City Dodge," "The Troubled Heir," and "One of Our Trains Is Missing," with Kelly. Crowley made 81 television appearances on various series and appeared in twenty movies between 1951 and 1970 (one of her last movie roles was in Downhill Racer with Robert Redford). Many of her films were low-budget sci-fi and horror movies, but she seemed to appear in practically every narrative television series produced in the late '50s and '60s, including Bourbon Street Beat, Surfside 6, Hawaiian Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Bat Masterson, Bonanza, Branded, My Three Sons, Donna Reed, Perry Mason, Checkmate, Bronco, Route 66, Thriller, Batman, Disneyland, Family Affair, Rawhide, The Lone Ranger, and many others.
Crowley was often confused with her acting contemporary Pat Crowley (frequently billed as "Patricia Crowley"), who appeared as guest leading lady in different episodes of many of the same television series and was not related. The two Crowleys were apparently never cast in the same episode.
In the Philip Roth novel American Pastoral, the protagonist marries Miss New Jersey 1949, in the book named Dawn Dwyer and having few similarities to Crowley's post-Miss New Jersey life (including a poorer finish in the Miss America pageant).
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