Joel Albert McCrea, (November 5, 1905 - October 20, 1990) was an American film actor.
Born in South Pasadena, California, McCrea became interested in films after graduating from Pomona College. He worked as an extra in films from 1927 before being cast in a major role in The Jazz Age (1929). A contract with MGM followed, and then another with RKO. He established himself as a handsome leading man who was considered versatile enough to star in both dramas and comedies.
In the 1930s, McCrea starred in two large-scale westerns, Wells Fargo (1937) with wife-to-be Francis Dee and Cecil B. DeMille's Union Pacific (1939) with Barbara Stanwyck. He reached the peak of his early career in the early 1940s, in such films as Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) and two by Preston Sturges, Sullivan's Travels (1941), and The Palm Beach Story (1942).
In the 1950s, McCrea appeared in the radio Western procedural police drama, Tales of the Texas Rangers.
McCrea also starred in two William A. Wellman westerns, The Great Man's Lady (1942), again with Stanwyck, and Buffalo Bill, with character actor Edgar Buchanan (1944). After the success of The Virginian (1946), McCrea made westerns exclusively for the rest of his career--with the exception of the British-made Rough Shoot (1953). In 1959, Joel McCrea and his son Jody McCrea starred in the NBC-TV series Wichita Town, which lasted one season and was produced by the Mirisch Corp. 1962 saw him united with fellow veteran of westerns Randolph Scott in Ride the High Country (1962), under the direction of Sam Peckinpah.
McCrea preferred to live the remainder of his life as a rancher. In 1969, he was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Joel McCrea has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6901 Hollywood Blvd. and another star at 6241 Hollywood Blvd. for his contribution to radio.
McCrea married actress Frances Dee in 1933. They had three children, David, Peter, and Jody McCrea, who also became an actor. Joel and Frances remained married until his death in Woodland Hills, California from pneumonia at the age of 84 in 1990.
According to David Raban's Stars of the '30s, the McCreas were prodigious savers, accumulating a large estate, which included working-ranch properties. Joel McCrea's work ethic was in part attributed to his Scottish heritage and it also may have stemmed from his friendship in the 1930s with fellow personality and sometime actor, Will Rogers. McCrea recounted that "the Oklahoma Sage" gave him a profound piece of advice: "Save half of what you make, and live on just the other half."
During his lifetime, McCrea and his wife Frances lived, raised their children, and rode their horses on their ranch in what was then an unincorporated area of eastern Ventura County, California. The McCreas ultimately donated several hundred acres of their personal property to the newly formed Conejo Valley YMCA for the city of Thousand Oaks, California, both of which celebrated their 40th anniversaries in 2004. Today, the land on which the Conejo Valley YMCA rests is called "Joel McCrea Park".
