This article was originally written for the Summer Under the Stars programming in the TCM Now Playing newsletter in August 2025.
Sweet soprano ingenue, perfect wife and mother, beloved character actress and…vengeful prostitute? Shirley Mae Jones of Charleroi, PA, has run the gamut in a career marked by notable successes and a surprising level of versatility. On Monday, August 25, TCM showcases some of her best, most varied roles as part of its annual Summer Under the Stars festival.
TCM devotes that night’s prime-time schedule to the key works from Jones’ musical career. She started singing from an early age, joining her church’s choir when she was just six. After high school, she entered and won the Miss Pittsburgh contest and came in second for Miss Pennsylvania. Before long she was in New York, where her audition for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein was so impressive, they put her under personal contract, the only singer they would ever sign. After joining the chorus of “South Pacific,” Jones moved into a small role in their 1953 play “Me and Juliet” and then took over the lead when it moved to Chicago. She later joined the European tour of “Oklahoma!,” where she met her first husband Jack Cassidy.
Rodgers and Hammerstein had long held out against offers to film their shows and were determined to maintain control over them on screen. For their initial production, they cast Jones to make her film debut as Laurey, the female star of Oklahoma! (1955), with Gordon MacRae as the cowboy who courts her. The film was so successful that she next played Julie Jordan, a role originally envisioned for Judy Garland, in Carousel (1956), again opposite MacRae. Away from Rodgers and Hammerstein, she got to sing with Pat Boone in April Love (1957), a hit that did a lot for her standing in Hollywood.
Despite her musical background, film musicals had been in decline since Jones arrived in Hollywood. Her charming personality and blonde beauty made her a natural for roles in romantic comedies, inevitably typecast as the ideal mate. In her first non-musical role, she was the mother of Bobbikins (1959), an infant who can already talk, although it only speaks to her husband (British comic Max Bygraves). But there was also a more serious side to Jones’ career. After catching her performance as an alcoholic in a 1956 episode of “Playhouse 90,” Burt Lancaster decided she was the perfect choice to play the prostitute Lulu Baines in his adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry (1960). Director Richard Brooks didn’t agree but had to acquiesce to his star’s wishes. He ignored her during her first day of shooting, but after watching the rushes, he called her to apologize and predict the role would bring her an Academy Award. He proved right, and Jones became an Oscar winner on April 17, 1961, when Hugh Griffith opened the envelope to reveal that she was that year’s Best Actress in a Supporting Role winner.
The following year, she scored her biggest musical success as Marian, the librarian and piano teacher courted by traveling con artist Robert Preston in The Music Man (1962). The film holds special memories for Jones and her family. She taught her eldest son, actor-producer Shaun Cassidy, to ride a bicycle during downtime on the set and was carrying her second son, future actor Patrick Cassidy, at the time. During one romantic embrace with Preston, he could even feel Patrick kicking in the womb. She followed The Music Man by playing a young divorcee who turns out to be the perfect mate that a motherless boy (Ron Howard) is seeking for his father (Glenn Ford) in The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1963). More romantic comedies followed, including A Ticklish Affair (1963), with Jones as a widow whose son’s mischief catches the attention of Navy officer Gig Young. The adults fall in love but must get past Jones’s aversion to the instability of military life.
Even as Jones moved into more diverse roles, she never strayed far from her musical roots. She sang to comic effect in The Secret of My Success (1965) as a revolutionary who involves British policeman James Booth in her plans. She would later return to the musical stage, taking on the role of Dorothy Brock, opposite her son Patrick in the Broadway revival of “42nd Street” and playing her original character’s mother in a Sacramento production of “The Music Man,” again opposite Patrick. Singing also played a key role in the TV series that would make her one of America’s favorite mothers.
Her most famous mother role was on the hit TV series “The Partridge Family” from 1970-1974, about a family pop band. Jones had earlier turned down the lead in “The Brady Bunch,” which went to her close friend Florence Henderson, but the combination of family comedy and music proved irresistible. She got a surprise early on when her stepson, David Cassidy, was cast as her eldest child and the family band’s lead vocalist. Working together led to their developing a close relationship. For four seasons, she dealt with her TV children’s growing pains as they toured the nation in an old school bus. The show produced several hit albums and singles, with their first, “I Think I Love You,” rising to number one on the hit parade. Although the series made her a television icon, it also typecast Jones in benign mother roles and kept her too busy to build on her big-screen career.
Initially, Jones had trouble finding another role of comparable power. She was still typecast in comedies and musicals. In addition, financial problems incurred by her husband’s profligate spending forced her to take whatever parts were offered, most of them fairly lightweight. Brooks came to the rescue with a meaty supporting role in The Happy Ending (1969). Jean Simmons stars as a frustrated wife who decides to join former college chum Jones, who’s had a string of affairs with married men, on a wild vacation in Nassau. The same year, Jones earned an Emmy nomination as a frustrated wife who has a fling with unhappily married Lloyd Bridges in Silent Night, Lonely Night. Then it was back to comedy, albeit more adult comedy, as the madame of a wild west brothel inherited by James Stewart in The Cheyenne Social Club (1970), co-starring Henry Fonda. It would be nine years before Jones made another theatrical feature, though she kept busy with guest shots and TV movies in the interim. Then she was cast as a nurse who survives the upending of the S.S. Poseidon and encounters fellow Oscar winners Michael Caine and Sally Field as members of a salvage crew out to claim whatever they can find in Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979).
Jones kept herself busy with TV guest shots, TV movies and theatrical features. She also built a new life with comedian Marty Ingels, whom she married in 1977, two years after divorcing Jack Cassidy. Among her later roles, she played a Red Cross volunteer fighting to get orphans out of Vietnam before the fall of Saigon in “The Children of An Lac” (1980), and she appeared as Drew Carey’s older girlfriend in three 1998-99 episodes of The Drew Carey Show. She earned Emmy nominations as widow Sydney Penny’s religious aunt in the Depression-set telefeature Hidden Places (2006) and an alcoholic singer on a 2009 episode of “The Cleaner.” She’s also a good friend of TCM, appearing at the network’s classic film festival more than once. In 2014, she helped open the festival with the launch of a restored print of Oklahoma! Nine years later, she appeared with her actor-producer son Shaun Cassidy and several of her grandchildren for a family reunion following a screening of The Music Man. She also set sail with the 2014 TCM Classic Movie Cruise and joined Robert Osborne to introduce The Music Man, Carousel and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father during a May 5, 2014, tribute to her career.
