Joan Alexander

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Joan Alexander (born Louise Abrass; April 16, 1915 – May 21, 2009) was an American actress best known for voicing Lois Lane on The Adventures of Superman radio show and in the Fleischer Superman cartoons.

Early life and name
She was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to a Lebanese-American family. Her father died when she was three, and after her mother remarried the family moved to Brooklyn, New York. She attended a convent school on Long Island, worked as a model, and studied acting in Europe with Yiddish theater director Benno Schneider. She later used the first name Joan, but the origin of the surname Alexander remains unclear to her family.

Career highlights
Alexander played newspaper reporter Lois Lane on the radio program The Adventures of Superman for more than 1,600 episodes, beginning in 1940. She also provided Lois Lane’s voice in the 1940s Fleischer Studios/Paramount Superman shorts, though she left the role after the ninth short when Famous Studios took over. She reprised Lois Lane for one season in the 1966 Filmation animated series The New Adventures of Superman. In addition to Lois Lane, she voiced Della Street on Perry Mason and played Althea on The Brighter Day on radio, and appeared on Dimension X. She was a regular panelist on the 1951–1955 ABC game show The Name's the Same and appeared on Broadway in Poor Richard (1964).

Personal life
Alexander first married actor John Sylvester White in 1944; they later divorced. She then married surgeon Robert Crowley, with whom she had a daughter, Jane Stanton Hitchcock. After their divorce, she married Arthur Stanton, head of World-Wide Volkswagen, in 1954 or 1955; Stanton adopted Jane when she was nine. The couple also had sons, Adam (died 1993) and Timothy. The Stantons were socialites in Manhattan and East Hampton. In 2008, Alexander filed a lawsuit alleging that Arthur Stanton had left her a large estate and that it had been mishandled.

Death
She died on May 21, 2009, in New York City at age 94 from an intestinal blockage. She was survived by her son Timothy, daughter Jane, and grandchildren Liam and Conrad.