Joan Lowell

Joan Lowell
Born	November 23, 1902 Berkeley, California
Died	November 7, 1967 Brasília, Distrito Federal, Brazil
Other names	Helen Trask
Occupation	Film actress, author, film director
Years active	1920–1934
Spouse(s)	Thompson Buchanan (1927-1930, divorced) Leek Bowen (m 1936)

Helen Joan Lowell (November 23, 1902 – November 7, 1967) was a movie actress of the silent film era from Berkeley, California. Lowell published a sensational autobiography, Cradle of the Deep, in 1929, which turned out to be a pure fabrication.

In 1929, Joan Lowell published an autobiography, Cradle of the Deep, published by Simon & Schuster, in which she claimed that her sea captain father took her aboard his ship, the Minnie A. Caine, at the age of three months when she was suffering from malnutrition. He nursed her back to health. She lived on the ship, with its all-male crew, until she was 17. She became skilled in the art of seamanship and once harpooned a whale by herself. Ultimately, the ship burned and sank off Australia, and Lowell swam three miles to safety, with a family of kittens clinging by their claws to her back. In fact, the book was a fabrication; Lowell had been on the ship, which remained safe in California, for only 15 months. The book was a sensational best seller until it was exposed as pure invention. The book was later parodied by Corey Ford in his book Salt Water Taffy in which Lowell abandons the sinking ship (which had previously sunk several times before "very badly") and swims to safety with her manuscript.

Lowell's mother was the daughter of a Massachusetts Lowell. Her father was the son of a landowner from Montenegro and a Turkish woman. Lowell feared that her father, Captain Nicholas Wagner (Preacher Nick), had died on December 24, 1924. Newspapers reported his ship, the Oceanic Vance, sank off the coast of Mexico. Two weeks overdue in Los Angeles, California, the schooner was sighted in January 1925, fifteen miles (24 km) northwest of San Diego, California. The Oceanic Vance had lost her convoy, the schooner Westerner, on Christmas Eve, 1924.

Lowell received her dramatic training from Gwendolen Logan Seiler, and became an extra at Goldwyn Pictures at the age of 17. She played bit parts in motion pictures as an extra. One of her first efforts was the role of Madge Barlow in the movie Loving Lies (1924). She was featured with Monte Blue in Cap'n Dan and in the Thompson Buchanan production of The Cub.

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