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Jeanne Crain’s ascent to movie stardom in the 1940s had all the earmarks of the classic local-girl-becomes-Hollywood-star story.
Her parents, George Crain and Loretta Carr, met while he was a small-town high school principal in Ray, North Dakota, in the early 1920s. They married in 1924 and decided to move west in search of a wider variety of employment opportunities.
George got a job as a high school English teacher in the California high desert town of Barstow. Jeanne Elizabeth Crain was the couple’s first child, born in Barstow on May 25, 1925.
When her father landed a new teaching post at Inglewood High School, the couple moved to a small house on Buckthorne Avenue in that city. Jeanne’s sister, Rita, was born in the city in 1927.
Loretta’s family, the Carrs, had also moved to California, buying a house on Van Ness Avenue on Inglewood’s eastern border. It was fortuitous for Loretta and her daughters that they did, as her marriage to George ended in an acrimonious divorce in 1932, and the women of the family moved in with the Carrs.
Jeanne’s primary school years were spent happily at St. Mary’s Academy, a Catholic all-girls school then located at Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, just north of Inglewood.

Actress Jeanne Crain with her husband, Paul Brinkman, at a June 8, 1963 Beverly Hills party at an unnamed location. (Photo courtesy of Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection)

Jeanne Crain, “Camera Girl of 1942,” poses for photos after winning the Long Beach competition. Wilmington Press Journal, April 18, 1942, Page 5. (Photo courtesy of Wilmington Press Journal archives)

Jeanne Crain and her pet tiger, Shah-Shah. Undated, circa 1946-47. (Photo courtesy of 20th Century Fox publicity photo)

In the eighth-grade, one of the nuns encouraged Jeanne to audition for “Scarface,” the school play about an Indian maiden. She surprised herself by winning the lead role, and discovered that she enjoyed playing someone else besides herself.
When it came time for high school, Jeanne wanted to stay at St. Mary’s, but private school tuition didn’t come cheap. Also, her father, who was still teaching at Inglewood High, insisted that Jeanne and her sister attend the public high school.
Jeanne found she enjoyed the social life at Inglewood High, and began to grow in confidence along with her natural beauty. In 1941, she entered the Miss California beauty contest as Miss Long Beach. She was 17 years old and, had she won, would have been too young to participate in the annual Miss America pageant.
She came in third, however, and her picture appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times the next day. This attracted the attention of 20th Century Fox studio talent scout Ivan Kahn, who got Jeanne her first film screen test. Nothing came of the test, mostly because of Crain’s youth, but she was on Hollywood’s radar.
Together with her fellow contestants, she was invited to tour the RKO Pictures studio, which had just released the Orson Welles film classic “Citizen Kane.” Welles noticed Crain while the contestants were eating lunch in the commissary, and had her do a screen test for his “Kane” followup, “The Magnificent Ambersons.” He later decided she wasn’t right for the part of Lucy Morgan in the film.
Encouraged by the attention, Jeanne was undaunted. There were more pageants to enter.
Her Inglewood High classmates voted her Grid Queen for the Sentinels’ 1941 football season. She also won the Miss Pan-Pacific beauty pageant held at the Pan-Pacific Auditorium, a major entertainment venue on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles at the time. (The then-dilapidated arena burned down in 1989 and is now the site of Pan-Pacific Park.)
In 1942, her mother encouraged her to enter the “Camera Girl” pageant in Long Beach when Jeanne was a high school senior. She did, winning the title of “Camera Girl of 1942” over 39 other contestants, and her photo once again ran in the Los Angeles Times. The titleholder also appeared in a Movietone newsreel shown at theaters around the country.
As a result of her win, she worked for a few months in the modeling industry with photographer William Mortensen, one of the contest’s judges. This led to her enrolling in Max Reinhardt’s Hollywood acting school, where agents and casting directors quickly “discovered” her.
In February 1943, she signed her first movie studio contract with 20th Century Fox. Her first role was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it walk-on part in the Technicolor musical “The Gang’s All Here” (1943). Studio head Darryl Zanuck found her a meatier part as an ingenue in “Home in Indiana” (1944), a light drama that became a surprise hit.
Crain was on her way to a highly successful string of films that included a supporting part in the 1944 war drama “Winged Victory” and a co-starring role with Gene Tierney in the color film noir classic “Leave Her to Heaven” (1945).
Her biggest success yet came with her appearance in the popular Rodgers and Hammerstein musical adaptation of “State Fair” (1945), along co-star Dana Andrews. She also received an Academy Award nomination for her title role as a light-skinned Black woman who passed for white in “Pinky” (1949). For the next few years, she was a full-fledged, very popular movie star.
The Crains moved to a house on Glencove Avenue in Westwood in 1944. After Jeanne married actor Paul Brinkman in 1945, the couple built their own house in the Hollywood Hills. Despite some rough patches, including the issuance of a divorce decree in 1956, they would go on to have seven children together.
Though she still appeared in films and on television occasionally, Jeanne’s high-profile Hollywood career eventually waned as she turned her attention toward raising her family.
She died in her Santa Barbara home from a heart attack on Dec. 14, 2003, two months after her husband’s passing. She was 78.
I almost forgot: shortly after they married, Jeanne and Paul adopted a tiger named Shah-Shah. But they failed to get an exotic animal permit. When their Hollywood Hills neighbors complained that Shah-Shah was getting loose and wreaking havoc, they had to give him up to the Griffith Park Zoo.
Sources: Girl Next Door: The Life and Career of Jeanne Crain, by Rupert Alistair, self-published, 2017. “Jeanne Crain,” Internet Movie Database. Los Angeles Times archives. San Pedro News Pilot archives. Wikipedia.
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