Broadway veteran Joan Copeland died January 4 in Manhattan. Born Joan Miller on June 1, 1922, in New York, “from the time I was a little girl I had the stage bug,” she told The New York Times. Copeland graduated from Brooklyn’s Abraham Lincoln H.S. and took her stage name to avoid trading on her brother Arthur’s fame. “Perhaps I was unconsciously influenced by my brother. He had made it. I was desperate to get out of the dreariness I was living in.” Copeland made her professional debut in 1945 as Juliet at BAM and her Broadway debut in the play Sundown Beach (1948). Her musical debut was in the short-lived Off-Broadway musical Conversation Piece (1957).
In “Pal Joey”
Her first Broadway musical assignment was as Vivien Leigh’s replacement in Tovarich (1963). She returned the following year in the short-lived musical Something More!, after a summer tour as Eliza in My Fair Lady, and ended the decade as Katharine Hepburn’s standby in the 1969 musical Coco. In 1970, she created the role of Esther in the Biblical musical Two by Two, but she was perhaps best-known for her performance as scheming socialite Vera Simpson in the 1976 Broadway revival of Pal Joey, which brought her a Drama Desk nomination. Below is Copeland singing “An Old Man” from the original Broadway cast album of Two by Two.
In “Camille Claudel”
In 1980, she would win a Drama Desk Award for her brother’s biographical drama The American Clock, in which she portrayed her own mother. In 1991, she won an Obie Award for her performance in the Off-Broadway production of Richard Greenberg’s play The American Plan, then spent the next decade as Judge Rebecca Stein on the TV series Law & Order (1991-2001). Her recent musical work includes the 2007 production of Frank Wildhorn’s Camille Claudel at Goodspeed.