Joan Chandler (1923-1979, née Cheeseman) was a dancer and actor who appeared in theater, film, and television in the 1940s and 1950s. She studied dance at the Bennington School of the Arts, and was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company in...
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Joan Chandler (1923-1979, née Cheeseman) was a dancer and actor who appeared in theater, film, and television in the 1940s and 1950s. She studied dance at the Bennington School of the Arts, and was a member of the Martha Graham Dance Company in the early 1940s. She first appeared on Broadway in The Late George Apley (1944), and began acting in films in the mid-1940s. The Joan Chandler papers (1923-1959) consist of photographs, clippings, programs, scrapbooks, contracts, correspondence, and other papers documenting her career, her secondary and post-secondary schooling, and her family. Chandler's upbringing and schooling in Butler, Pennsylvania are represented by yearbooks, photographs, class notes, programs, sheet music, clippings, and memorabilia, mostly from the late 1930s and 1940. Materials from the Bennington School of the Arts date from 1939 to 1941 and include class notes on the Graham technique, orientation materials, performance programs, sheet music ("Modern Dance Technique Accompaniments" by Zoe Williams), and a script (The King and the Duke by Francis Fergusson). There are several programs from Chandler's performances with Graham and with the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre, as well as two photographs of a Neighborhood Playhouse school production of Heart of a City. Photographs consist mostly of promotional images of Chandler, though there are also photographs of her as a child and photographs of her family members. Theater and film productions she appeared in are represented by clippings, production photographs, programs, contracts, and correspondence. There are photographs from the set of Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope (1948). The best-represented theater productions are My Three Angels (1953) and The Late George Apley. Materials concerning the latter production include a scrapbook. The collection contains a small number of letters and telegrams, most of which are congratulatory notes, but which also include a short 1953 letter from José Ferrer talking about his acting style and his sense of being out of place among young actors. There is a script for a 1959 Actors Studio production of Herr Biedermann and the Arsonists, a directed by Mordecai Gorelik, and a pamphlet about the Actors Studio. The collection includes an audio recording.
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