Joan Shawlee

Joan Shawlee was an American actress of film and television who trained in ballet under Ernest Belcher and modeled for the John Robert Powers agency as a teenager. Born in Forest Hills, New York, she worked as a Broadway showgirl billed as Joyce Ring in By Jupiter (1942) and A Connecticut Yankee (1943). She gained notice for small roles in movies featuring Jack Lemmon and directed by Billy Wilder, most memorably as bandleader Sweet Sue in Some Like It Hot (1959). She played Sylvia in The Apartment (1960) and Amazon Annie in Irma la Douce (1963), and appeared in Wilder's final film, Buddy Buddy (1981). On television, she had a recurring role as Fiona Pickles Sorrell on The Dick Van Dyke Show and starred in The Adventures of Aggie from 1956 to 1957. She also acted on The Abbott and Costello Show and, in the early 1960s, formed a nightclub act with Mitzi McCall.