Julie Bishop (actress)

Julie Bishop (born Jacqueline Brown; August 30, 1914 – August 30, 2001), previously known as Jacqueline Wells, was an American film and television actress.

Julie Bishop was born Jacqueline Brown in Denver, Colorado on August 30, 1914.

She appeared in more than 80 films between 1923 and 1957.

She was a child actress, beginning her career in 1923, in either Children of Jazz or Maytime (sources are contradictory).

By 1932, she was already a veteran film actress.

Her earliest talkies were with the Hal Roach studio, where she worked in short-subject comedies with Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, and The Boy Friends.

Then she began freelancing, working in supporting roles at large studios and in leading roles at small studios.

Her ingenue role in the 1936 Laurel and Hardy feature The Bohemian Girl won her a contract at Columbia Pictures, where she starred in a succession of minor features, mostly action fare.

She left Columbia in 1939 and resumed her freelance career.

She used the family name Wells professionally through 1941, and also appeared on stage (and in one film) as Diane Duval.

In 1941, she was offered a contract by Warner Bros. on the condition that she change her name; "Jacqueline Wells" was considered a faded, B-picture name.

She chose the name Julie Bishop because it matched the monograms on her luggage (created when her married name was Jacqueline Brooks).

She made 16 films at Warners, including supporting roles in Action in the North Atlantic (1943) with Humphrey Bogart and Princess O'Rourke (1943), starring Olivia de Havilland and Robert Cummings.

While filming the latter, she met her second husband, Clarence Shoop, a pilot.

She was Errol Flynn's leading lady in Northern Pursuit (1943), played Ira Gershwin's wife in the biopic Rhapsody in Blue (1945), and closed out her Warners years in 1946's Cinderella Jones.

In 1949, Bishop played a down-on-her-luck wife and mother in the Sands of Iwo Jima, opposite John Wayne.

Bishop was a Republican and campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election.

She was also an Episcopalian.

She was among several former Wayne co-stars (including Laraine Day, Ann Doran, Jan Sterling, and Claire Trevor) who joined the actor in 1954's aviation drama, The High and the Mighty.

She went on to work in television, notably opposite Bob Cummings in his situation comedies.

She retired from acting in 1957.

Bishop died of pneumonia on her 87th birthday, August 30, 2001 in Mendocino, California.

She is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California in the same plot as her second husband, Clarence A. Shoop.