The Kean Sisters

Today marks the 100th birthday of actress and performer Jane Kean (1923-2013), who performed for many years in a two-act with her sister Betty Kean (1914-1986). Fortuitously, it also happens to be Siblings Day! As the Kean Sisters, throughout the 1940s and ’50s the girls played nightclubs, radio, tv variety shows, and the vaudeville style Broadway show Ankles Aweigh (1955), alongside Thelma Carpenter and Gabe Dell of the Dead End Kids. The women were from Harford, Connecticut.

The elder of the two, Betty might be most notable for her celebrity husbands: she was married to Frank Fay,Jim Backus, and Lew Parker (who played Marlo Thomas’s father on That Girl). On Broadway she appeared in George White’s Music Hall Varieties (1932), Crazy with the Heat (1941), The Sun Field (1942), and Along Fifth Avenue (1949). Her movies included Moonlight Masquerade (1942) with Dennis O’Keefe and Jane Frazee; Gals Incorporated (1943) with Leon Errol and Harriet Nelson; Sing a Jingle (1944) with Allan Jones; Hi Good Lookin’ (1944) with Eddie Quillan and Ozzie and Harriet; Slightly Terrific (1944) with Errol and Quillan; Murder in the Blue Room (1944) with Anne Gwynne; and My Gal Loves Music (1944) with Bob Crosby. TV acting credits included roles on The Andy Griffith Show,My World and Welcome to It, Happy Days,Police Woman,The Bob Newhart Show, and The Love Boat. Her very last performance was as an old vaudevillian on The Facts of Life.

Jane’s husbands weren’t as well known, but she has better known solo credits: she replaced Joyce Randolph as Trixie in the color/musical versions of Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners; she was in the cast of Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol, and she had a good role in the Disney movie Pete’s Dragon (1977) among many other things. Like Betty, she alternated Broadway and films in the ’40s. Jane’s Broadway appearances were in Early to Bed (1943), The Girl from Nantucket (1945), Call Me Mister (1946), Along Fifth Avenue (1949) and Carnival! (1961). Her early screen credits were smaller and fewer than Betty’s; you can glimpse her in bit parts in Sailors on Leave (1941), and Flying with Music (1942). Later you could see her on The Phil Silvers Show,The Danny Thomas Show,The Lucy Show,Love American Style, Cannonand other shows. Her last acting credit was in Fred Olen Ray’sAbner the Invisible Dog (2013).

The Kean Sisters also performed together and separately on most of the major TV variety shows of the ’50s and ’60s.

For more on show business history, please see No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And please keep an eye out forVaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming out from Bear Manor Media this November!