Personal Life
McCrea married actress Frances Dee in 1933, after they met while filming The Silver Cord. The couple had three children, David, who became a rancher; Peter, who became a real estate developer; and Jody, who became an actor. Joel and Frances remained married until his death — spending 57 years together.
According to David Ragan's Stars of the '30s, the McCreas were prodigious savers, accumulating a large estate, which included working-ranch properties. Joel McCrea's work ethic was in part attributed to his Scottish heritage and it also may have stemmed from his friendship in the 1930s with fellow personality and sometime actor, Will Rogers. McCrea recounted that "the Oklahoma Sage" gave him a profound piece of advice: "Save half of what you make, and live on just the other half."
McCrea – who was an outdoorsman who had once listed his occupation as "rancher" and his hobby as "acting" – had begun buying property as early as 1933, when he purchased his first 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) in what was then an unincorporated area of eastern Ventura County, California, but later became Thousand Oaks, California. This was the beginning of what became a 3,000-acre (12 km2) spread on which McCrea and his wife Frances lived, raised their children, and rode their horses.
By the time the 1940s ended, McCrea was a multi-millionaire, as much from his real-estate dealings as from his movie stardom. In the late 1960s, he sold 1,200 acres (4.9 km2) of land to an oil company, on the condition that they would not drill within sight of his home.
The McCreas ultimately donated several hundred acres of their personal property to the newly formed Conejo Valley YMCA for the city of Thousand Oaks, California. Today, the land on which the Conejo Valley YMCA rests is called "Joel McCrea Park".
Joel McCrea made his final public appearance on October 3, 1990, at a fundraiser for Republican gubernatorial candidate Pete Wilson in Beverly Hills. He died less than three weeks later, on October 20, in Woodland Hills, California from pneumonia, at the age of 84.
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