Early Life and Career
Jeanne Laverne Carmen was born in Paragould, Arkansas. As a child she picked cotton before running away from home at age 13. As a teen, she moved to New York City and landed a job as a dancer in Burlesque, with Bert Lahr. Later she became a model, appearing in several men's magazines. She also became a trick golfer, appearing with Jack Redmond.
While in her 20s, she came to Hollywood and appeared in B movies such as Guns Don't Argue and The Monster of Piedras Blancas. Carmen's sultry good looks, naturally dark hair, hourglass figure, and striking green eyes quickly landed her on the big screen in 1956 playing a feisty Spanish senorita named "Serelda" in The Three Outlaws, a Western based on the same events as the later Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and co-starring Neville Brand and Alan Hale, Jr as Butch and Sundance. She was then cast by producer/director Howard W. Koch as an Indian girl in War Drums alongside Lex Barker of Tarzan fame. Koch took a liking to Carmen and cast her in his next flick for Warner Bros, the teenage rock n roll juvenile delinquent themed Untamed Youth in 1957 co-starring Rockabilly legend Eddie Cochran, which inspired Cochran to cover the song "Jeannie, Jeannie, Jeannie" for her.
Carmen also appeared as a femme fatale in Portland Exposé alongside Frank Gorshin who later gained fame as the "Riddler" on the Batman series. She also appeared in the Three Stooges short subject A Merry Mix Up playing Joe Besser's girlfriend "Mary." The short is notable for the Stooges playing three sets of identical triplets.
Read more about this topic: Jeanne Carmen
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“I don’t believe one grows older. I think that what happens early on in life is that at a certain age one stands still and stagnates.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)