Jeanette Nolan Collection

Jeanette Nolan
(1911 – 1998)

It is not surprising when a kid from Detroit goes into the auto industry and remains an auto worker until the day he retires. In the same way, no one would raise an eyebrow if they heard about someone from Oklahoma who spent their entire working life in the oil industry or that a Maine native was a lifelong lobster fisherman.

Jeanette Nolan, one to the most prolific actresses in the Golden Age of Radio grew up in Los Angeles. When she went into show business, she was just getting into the local industry.

Ms. Nolan was born in LA in 1911 and graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School. She got the acting bug while attending Los Angeles City College and began working at the Pasadena Playhouse. In 1932, she was cast as one of the "Hindu girls" in Omar Khayyam on KHJ. It was the first transcontinental broadcast to originate from California, and Jeanette later related that the experience was "overwhelming". The same year she found work as "La of Opar" in the syndication of Tarzan of the Apes. While recording another syndicated serial, she met her future husband, John McIntire. McIntire was the narrator for Tarzan and the Diamond of Asher.

The couple married in 1935, and migrated to New York which was the real center of radio at the time. They each found work on The March of Time, and were regulars on The Jack Pearl Show. Jeanette also joined Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater troupe. In 1937, the McIntires bought a ranch in Montana where they would spend much of their free time for the rest of their lives.

Jeanette became one of radio’s busiest stars, with regular appearances on Lux Radio Theater, Cavalcade of America, The Great Gildersleeve, Young Doctor Malone, Let George Do It, Yours Truly Johnny Dollar and Suspense. She also made appearances on Escape, The Whistler, The Lineup, Nightbeat, and many others.

Welles gave Janette her movie debut when he cast her as Lady Macbeth. The production was an attempt by Republic Studios to shed their reputation as the home of Roy Rogers’s musicals. Macbeth (1948) was pitched as a "perfect cross between Wuthering Heights and Bride of Frankenstein". The film had to be redubbed before general release because audiences complained about Jeanette’s thick Scottish burr. Although the film did not fare well in competition with Olivier’s Hamlet, critical appreciation has grown over the years.

In her more than 300 TV appearances, Jeanette effectively became the queen of TV Westerns. She was a frequent guest on Wagon Train which starred husband John McIntire as trailmaster Chris Hale. Ms. Nolan was comfortable on radio Westerns as well, with appearances on Have Gun, Will Travel, Six Shooter, Tales of the Texas Rangers, Frontier Gentleman, Fort Laramie and Gunsmoke. She was the most frequent female guest star on the TV version of Gunsmoke, and one of the characters she portrayed, "Dirty Sally Fergus", became the centerpiece of the classic show’s only spinoff, Dirty Sally.

Nolan and McIntire did voice work together for Disney’s The Rescuers and The Fox and the Hound. John McIntire succumbed to lung cancer and emphysema in Pasadena in 1991. One of Ms. Nolan’s last roles was a cameo as Robert Redford’s in The Horse Whisperer which was filmed near her Montana home. Jeanette died at her Montana ranch on June 5, 1998, from complications related to a stroke. She was 86.