Biography

Joyce DeWitt

Jump to

Overview

Born
April 23, 1949 · Wheeling, West Virginia, USA
Birth name
Joyce Anne DeWitt
Nicknames
- Joycey
- First Lady of the Dinner Theatre
Height
5′ 3½″ (1.61 m)

Biography

Joyce Anne DeWitt was born the second oldest of four to parents Paul and Norma DeWitt on April 23, 1949 in Wheeling, West Virginia but grew up in Indiana. Joyce began taking acting lessons when she was in high school. Although her father was hardly thrilled at his daughter's ambition, she persuaded him to let her major in theater in college. DeWitt soon moved to UCLA where she received her master's degree. After college, she worked as a legal secretary while at the same time going from audition to audition. Months passed before ABC offered her a choice of two comedy pilots but gave her only 24 hours to decide on which. After reading both scripts in a hurry, she chose the one about one guy living with two girls (Three's Company (1976)). She chose well - the other show never sold. She had been in numerous amounts of plays before but became familiar to everyone as the sensible, down-to-earth, football jersey wearing, brunette roommate Janet Wood.

DeWitt became famous and while many celebrities would automatically welcome in the huge amounts of attention, she usually kept to herself and didn't care too much for publicity.
- IMDb mini biography by: scissorhands

Family

Parents

Trivia

When shooting Three's Company (1976), she always wore either pantyhose or tights, and refused to work bare-legged. Though this caused conflict between her and the show's producers, it endeared her to hosiery manufacturers, and she became the spokeswoman for L'eggs pantyhose in the late 1970s.
Auditioned as Fonzie's girlfriend on Happy Days (1974) in the late 1970s, although she did not get chosen for the role (explaining she was too short and young), she was cast as Janet Wood on Three's Company (1976) just several weeks later.
In 1979, Joyce missed one episode of Three's Company (1976) titled Stanley's Hotline (1979), when the network tried to take back a raise that was promised, so she called in sick, because she was "sick at heart, sick in the soul". She had a meeting with the network president, who reinstated her raise. When she told her producers she was ready to go back to work, they felt there was not enough preparation time and were already working with a reworked script with recurring guest star Anne Schedeen getting Joyce's lines. She later praised Schedeen's work, calling her one of her favorite guest stars.
Her and John Ritter's favorite episode of Three's Company (1976) is Up in the Air (1982). It had a long comic dance by Ritter that earned him a Emmy nomination. One of her least favorite episodes is titled Janet Wigs Out (1982) where her character wears a blond wig and treats everyone so badly, that one regular character Cindy (Jenilee Harrison) leaves the show entirely, never to return.
After Three's Company (1976) ended, she traveled the world before settling in New Mexico. She is slowly returning to acting. She and Suzanne Somers did not speak to each other for 30 years after Suzanne left the show in 1981. Finally, in February 2012, they reunited after Suzanne invited Joyce to be a guest on her web series "Suzanne Somers: Breaking Through".

Quotes

[on the politics of Hollywood] If that's the way the game is played, I don't want to play anymore.
[on her stardom] Shirley MacLaine once said that she didn't want to be a big star, just a long star. That's what I want too.
[on Suzanne Somers (2009)] I rarely talk about this, but we never actually had an argument. After her fight with the producers, as part of her publicity tour to make herself seem innocent, she made John [Ritter] and I the enemy. Several times over the past 20 years I've left messages, notes, letters, and have given her the phone number for the phone that rings right beside my bed, but she has never chosen to reach me, and, yet, publicly and in the press, she still tells people that I don't speak to her.
[2009: on rumors that she spent her pre-Hollywood years as a contractor who, after painting the garage of Barney Miller (1975) co-star Abe Vigoda, became a sort of surrogate daughter to the actor] It's totally untrue. I've never even met Abe Vigoda. I never painted his house, his garage or any other thing he has. I often wonder if he thinks I'm this crazy person who made all of this up.
[on Farrah Fawcett] She had a beautiful heart. She was a lovely human being and such a brave woman, right up to her final moments. She chose to share her circumstances, her illness, with the world in order that those who had similar circumstances would be enlightened and inspired, and I have a great deal of respect for the way she left this life.