Joey Heatherton

The credits here catch Joey Heatherton at three separate stages of a career that ran on television. The earliest are straight dramatic guest parts in the early 1960s, on The Nurses, Breaking Point and Arrest and Trial, the sort of anthology and procedural work a young actress used to build a reputation with. Then comes the version most people remember: the variety circuit, dancing and singing on Hullabaloo and later The Sonny and Cher Show, plus more than a decade touring in front of American troops on Bob Hope's USO shows. There is even a 1973 appearance on the German comedy series Klimbim, which is the sort of thing a working variety performer accumulated.

She was, in the language of the time, a sex symbol, and the phrase did her no favours. It attached early, it shaped what she was offered, and it is still the first thing written about her. What the guest work shows is an actress with real timing who was mostly hired for something else. The features were sporadic, among them My Blood Runs Cold in 1965 and The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington in 1977, neither of which is among the credits listed here.

The last stop in this list is the sharpest joke about all of it: a small part in Cry-Baby in 1990, which casts a 1960s television sex symbol as somebody's mother, a gag that is affectionate and pointed at the same time. Bluebeard, in 1972, is the other feature.