Jan Shepard, Actress in ‘King Creole’ and a Wagonful of TV Westerns, Dies at 96
Jan Shepard, who guest-starred on Rawhide, The Virginian, Gunsmoke and two dozen other TV Westerns and played opposite Elvis Presley in movies eight years apart, has died. She was 96.
Shepard died Jan. 17 at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank of pneumonia brought on by respiratory failure, her son, Hollywood prop master, Brandon Boyle, told The Hollywood Reporter. “She was a good one and will be dearly missed,” he said.
Shepard portrayed Mimi, the sister of Presley’s Danny Fisher, in the Michael Curtiz-directed King Creole (1958) and the wife of Danny Kohana (James Shigeta), who partners with Presley’s Rick Richards in a helicopter business, in Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966).
“The first time, I found him to be just the cutest kid around, a big teddy bear, a lot of fun,” she said in an interview for Boyd Magers and Michael G. Fitzgerald’s 1999 book, Westerns Women. But on their next movie, “He’d come back from the service and had changed. He had a lot of bodyguards around him.”
Her big-screen résumé also included the cult B-movie Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), directed by Bernard L. Kowalski and produced by brothers Gene and Roger Corman for American International Pictures.
In 1954, the delightful Shepard appeared in her first TV Western, the syndicated anthology series Death Valley Days, and followed by getting dusty on The Adventures of Kit Carson, The Lone Ranger, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, Tales of the Texas Rangers, Rawhide, Tombstone Territory, Wanted: Dead or Alive, Bat Masterson, Gunsmoke (four episodes), Laramie, Lawman, The Virginian (five episodes) and The High Chaparral, among others.
Josephine Angela Sorbello was born on March 19, 1928, in Quakertown, Pennsylvania. At Quakertown High School, she acted in plays and was a cheerleader, drum majorette and valedictorian.
She came to Los Angeles in 1949 and joined a theater group, the Ben Bard Players, and trained at the Pasadena Playhouse.
Meanwhile, she also worked as a secretary at an I. Magnin department store in order to pay the $25 in rent for the Hollywood Boulevard apartment she shared with future Gunsmoke star Amanda Blake, she recalled in a 2019 interview with Alan K. Rode.
Shepard made her onscreen debut on a 1952 episode of Fireside Theater and was soon being booked on shows including I Married Joan, Big Town, Private Secretary, Waterfront, Public Defender and The Loretta Young Show.
She played a nurse on the 1957 syndicated series Dr. Christian, starring Macdonald Carey, and was a regular on a pair of ’60s soap operas: CBS’ The Clear Horizon, which was set at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and revolved around astronauts and their families, and the ABC legal drama Day in Court.
She got her part in King Creole, which she called “the break of her life,” with the help of her good friend, Dolores Hart, who played Presley’s love interest in the movie.
Presley gave her a pair of 10-cent earrings as a joke while they worked on the Paramount film, then presented her with a huge stuffed tiger and a movie camera when Hart threw a surprise birthday party for her.
“Dolores said the next day she ran into Elvis and she said, ‘I was so surprised that you came,’” Shepard remembered. “He said [with a laugh], ‘I had to come, she’s my sister. I wouldn’t miss her birthday party.’
“I ran into him in the studio. He said to me, ‘I hear Elvis was at your birthday party.’ ‘Yeah, he was.’ He said, ‘You know, he never goes anywhere, people go to him, he never goes to other people’s homes.’”
When Hart quit Hollywood to become a nun, Shepard and Maria Cooper, Gary Cooper’s daughter, became her godmothers.
In 1962, she starred with James Drury and Simon Oakland in Third of a Man, an acclaimed film about mental illness.
Shepard also appeared on four episodes of Perry Mason and on such other series as Highway Patrol, Mannix, Land of the Giants, Then Came Bronson and, in 1973 for her last onscreen credit, The Rookies.
Her husband was Wyatt Earp actor Dirk London (real name Ray Boyle). They first met at Ben Bard in 1951 and were married from 1954 — when they worked together on her Death Valley Days episode — until his death at age 98 in January 2022.
Survivors include Brandon, who did prop work on such shows as Murder, She Wrote and The Newsroom (when he was a toddler, his mom wouldn’t allow him to be in the Presley movie G.I. Blues because the writers would have wanted him to bawl); daughter-in-law Jenn; grandchildren Riley and Hayley; and nephew Andrew, his wife, Danielle, and their daughter, Olivia.
