This blonde actress, who has been on stage since her youth, developed into a fine character player of both comedy and drama, capable of a wide range from hard-as-nails dames to overbearing mothers to dull matrons to fraught, nervous Nellies. Her older brother Dick was already a working actor when their mother entered two-year old Joyce Van Patten in a Shirley Temple look-alike contest, which she won. Within four years, she was appearing on Broadway in "Love's Old Sweet Song". Over the course of the next fifty-odd years, Van Patten graced numerous plays including "Desk Set" (1952), with Shirley