Brenda Joyce - Tarzan Actress

Brenda Joyce (February 25, 1917– July 4, 2009) was an American film actress. She was born as Betty Graftina Leabo in Excelsior Springs, Missouri, family and friends referred to her as Graftina, she is best-remembered as the seventh actress to play Jane in the Tarzan series of films. Her first four appearances as Jane were opposite Johnny Weissmuller. However, her last performance as Jane, in Tarzan's Magic Fountain (1949), was with Lex Barker as Tarzan. Joyce and Karla Schramm from the silent era were the only two actresses to play Jane opposite two different actors playing Tarzan. Tarzan began from an aviatrix emerges. An aviatrix emerges from the jungle looking as young as she was when her plane went down many years before. Unscrupulous hunters discover that this is due to a secret fountain of youth. Tarzan tries to keep the hunters from finding the hidden valley setting of the fountain. The flyer ages as the effects of the fountain wear off. TARZAN'S MAGIC FOUNTAIN has an intriguing opening; a long-missing 'Amelia Earhart'-type aviatrix (Evelyn Ankers) comes out of the jungle, looking years younger than her actual age, to save her wrongly convicted husband (future 'Batman' star Alan Napier). While Tarzan knows the secret of her youth, he refuses to share the knowledge with Jane. Soon the couple return, and the woman flier has aged, considerably.Tarzan refuses to return the couple and their party to where she had achieved her 'youth', so Jane decides to take them herself, based on what the flier remembered of the journey, and the bits and pieces she'd learned from Tarzan. The group reach a forbidden city, and a fountain that IS the 'Fountain of Youth'...and face the ire of the 'lost civilization' living there, who had trusted Tarzan to keep their location secret. Naturally, the other members of the couple's group turn out to be money-hungry evil men, who reveal their true intentions with bloodshed...and it's Tarzan to the rescue! Brenda Joyce has died of pneumonia at the age of 92. She died on 4 July at a nursing home in New York, after a decade-long battle with dementia.