Joan Staley, who co-starred in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken with Don Knotts and appeared on 77 Sunset Strip, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and a McHale’s Navy spinoff, has died. She was 79 years old.
Staley died of heart failure on Sunday at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Valencia, California, according to her family.
Staley played Marge, the jilted girlfriend of carnival singer Charlie Rogers (Elvis Presley) in Roustabout (1964), and she gets to slap him across the face in the film.
“I asked him if he wanted me to pull up,” she recalled in Tom Lisanti’s 2001 book, Fantasy Femmes of Sixties Cinema. “He said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Are you sure? I could leave a welt.’ He replied, ‘That’s OK.’ So I belted him. That slap you hear in the film was not put in afterward — that was the slap.”
Staley also appeared in memorable roles as a waitress with Robert Mitchum in Cape Fear (1962) and as a stewardess with Paul Newman in A New Kind of Love (1963). (1963).
Staley played damsel in distress and Knotts’ love interest Alma Parker in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966), a spoof of haunted house movies that became a huge box office hit for Universal. She wore a brunette wig she said was left over from a Claudia Cardinale film.
In 1966, she appeared in Gunpoint as a kidnapped saloon singer who is rescued by Audie Murphy and on Batman as Shame’s (Cliff Robertson) villainous sidekick Okie Annie. Staley, however, broke her back in a horseback riding accident that year, effectively ending her career.
Joan Staley cause of death
What happened to actress Joan Staley? Joan Staley cause of death according to her family is heart failure. Staley died on Sunday of heart failure at Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital in Valencia, California.