Joan Diener
| Joan Diener | |
|---|---|
Diener in Man of La Mancha.
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|
| Born |
February 24, 1930 Columbus, Ohio, U.S. |
| Died | May 13, 2006 (aged 76) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Occupation | Stage actress, singer |
| Spouse(s) | Albert Marre (19??–2006; her death); 2 children |
Joan Diener (February 24, 1930 – May 13, 2006) was an American theatre actress and singer with a three-and-a-half-octave range.
Born in Columbus, Ohio, Diener majored in psychology at Sarah Lawrence College and moonlighted as an actress while still a student. She made her Broadway debut in the 1948 revue Small Wonder, choreographed by Gower Champion and co-starring Tom Ewell, Alice Pearce and Jack Cassidy. She appeared in the 1950 comedy Season in the Sun, written by The New Yorker magazine's theatre critic, Wolcott Gibbs.
Diener met her future husband, theatre director Albert Marre, when she won the role of Lalume, the seductive wife of the Wazir, in Kismet, winning a Theatre World Award for her performance. They were married three years later and subsequently had a son Adam and a daughter Jennifer.
In 1958, Marre directed a production of At the Grand, a musical adaptation of Vicki Baum's 1930 novel Grand Hotel, in Los Angeles with Diener as an opera diva (a ballerina in the book) who falls in love with a charming, but larcenous, faux baron. (Although the show never reached Broadway, it was revamped drastically more than thirty years later and, directed by Tommy Tune, became the hit Grand Hotel.)
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