Jean Willes

Jean Donahue, born Jean Willes on April 15, 1923 in Los Angeles, California, spent a peripatetic childhood moving between Seattle and Salt Lake City before her family returned to Hollywood, where she first tasted the stage with a local little‑theater troupe. Her parents, William Simmons Willes and Velma Harrington Duncan Willes, encouraged her early fascination with performance, and by her early teens she was already auditioning for bit parts. In 1934 she entered the film industry as an extra, and over the next decade she honed a versatile screen presence that could shift from comic timing to gritty drama. By 1947 she had adopted her married name, Jean Donahue, for billing, a decision that coincided with her first credited feature, The Winner’s Circle (1948). The transition from uncredited walk‑ons to substantive supporting roles marked the beginning of a prolific era that would span nearly four decades. Willes became a familiar face in both Columbia’s Three Stooges shorts—memorable turns in Monkey Businessmen, A Snitch in Time, Don’t Throw That Knife and Gypped in the Penthouse—and in major studio pictures such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), where she portrayed the compassionate Nurse Sally Withers. Her television résumé reads like a map of 1950s‑60s American pop culture, with guest spots on The Twilight Zone (“Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”), Bonanza, The Munsters, Perry Mason, The Beverly Hillbillies and Kojak, among countless others. In 1951 she married former NFL player Gerard Cowhig, and the couple raised a son, Gerry, while she continued to work steadily, often typecast as a seductive femme fatale or an authoritative military officer. Jean Willes succumbed to liver cancer on January 3, 1989, in Van Nuys, California, and was laid to rest at San Fernando Mission Cemetery, leaving behind a legacy of over sixty‑five film appearances and an indelible imprint on mid‑century American entertainment.