Julie Bishop (actress)


Julie Bishop, previously known as Jacqueline Wells, was an American film and television actress. She appeared in more than 80 films between 1923 and 1957.

Early life

Julie Bishop was born Jacqueline Brown in Denver, Colorado on August 30, 1914. She used the family name Wells professionally through 1941, and also appeared on stage as Diane Duval. She was a child actress, beginning her career in 1923, in either Children of Jazz or Maytime.

Career

By 1932, she was already a veteran film actress. Her earliest talkies were with the Hal Roach studio, where she worked in short-subject comedies with Laurel and Hardy, Charley Chase, and The Boy Friends. Then she began freelancing, working in supporting roles at large studios and in leading roles at small studios. Her ingenue role in the 1936 Laurel and Hardy feature The Bohemian Girl won her a contract at Columbia Pictures, where she starred in a succession of minor features, mostly action fare. She left Columbia in 1939 and resumed her freelance career.
In 1941, she was offered a contract by Warner Bros. on the condition that she change her name; "Jacqueline Wells" was considered a faded, B-picture name. She chose the name Julie Bishop because it matched the monograms on her luggage.
She made 16 films at Warners, including supporting roles in Action in the North Atlantic with Humphrey Bogart and Princess O'Rourke, starring Olivia de Havilland and Robert Cummings. While filming the latter, she met her second husband, Clarence Shoop, a pilot. She was Errol Flynn's leading lady in Northern Pursuit, played Ira Gershwin's wife in the biopic Rhapsody in Blue, and closed out her Warners years in 1946's Cinderella Jones.
In 1949, Bishop played a down-on-her-luck wife and mother in the Sands of Iwo Jima, opposite John Wayne. She was among several former Wayne co-stars who joined the actor in 1954's aviation drama, The High and the Mighty.
She went on to work in television, notably opposite Bob Cummings in his situation comedies. She retired from acting in 1957.

Personal life

Bishop was a Republican and campaigned for Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election.
She was also an Episcopalian.

Death

Bishop died of pneumonia on her 87th birthday, August 30, 2001 in Mendocino, California. She is interred at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California in the same plot as her second husband, Clarence A. Shoop.

Selected filmography