Biography
Trained at the Pasadena Playhouse, Texas-born Carolyn Jones supported herself as a radio disk jockey when acting jobs were scarce. She entered films as a bit player in 1952, attaining prominence for a role in which (for the most part) she neither moved nor spoke: the waxwork Joan of Arc -- actually one of mad sculptor
Vincent Price's many murder victims -- in 1953's
House of Wax. In 1957, Jones was Oscar-nominated for her five-minute role as a pathetic "good time girl" in
The Bachelor Party; two years later, she stole the show in
Frank Capra's
A Hole in the Head as
Frank Sinatra's bongo-playing girlfriend. During the early 1960s, Jones was married to producer
Aaron Spelling, who frequently cast her on such TV series as
The Dick Powell Show and
Burke's Law. In 1964, Jones achieved TV sitcom immortality as the ghoulishly sexy Morticia Addams on the popular series
The Addams Family. Though her TV and movie activities were curtailed by illness in her last decade (she died of cancer in 1983), Carolyn Jones continued making occasional appearances, notably a return engagement as Morticia in a 1978
Addams Family reunion special. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide