June Kenney
June Kenney
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Petite and amiable blonde 50s B-movie starlet June Kenney was groomed for a performing career from early childhood. By the age of four she was proficient as a singer and dancer. Her mother enrolled her in the 'Meglin Kiddies' dancing troupe (Judy Garland was a former alumnus) to learn ballet and tap. Hoping to break into films, teenaged June attended the Hollywood Professional School and made ends meet as an usherette at Grauman's Chinese. While acting in a local play she was spotted by the brother of talent agent and producer Paul Kohner and signed up with the agency. Her first appearance on screen was in 1952. She made little headway for the first five years, though her face and voice garnered some exposure through TV ads for Vaseline, Coppertone and Austin-Healy.
In 1957, June headlined as a juvenile delinquent in her first feature: Roger Corman's Teenage Doll (1957). Corman liked her performance and this paved the way to further leads in teen exploitation flics like Sorority Girl (1957), Hot Car Girl (1958) and the interminable titled The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957). Her stock-in-trade characters were usually naive girls caught up in bad company or unjustly accused. June attracted some scream queen notice in Bert I. Gordon's sub-zero budget Dr. Cyclops (1940) pastiche Attack of the Puppet People (1958) and in the even sillier Earth vs the Spider (1958). With this resume, it was somehow inevitable that she would end up being typecast as a B-movie actress. Unable to break out of the mould and obtain better roles, June's career took a turn for the worse after her final starring fling (in Bloodlust! (1961), an inferior reworking of Richard Connell's İnsan Avcısı (1932) ) was universally panned by critics and audiences alike. By 1962, she seems to have lost heart, abandoned acting and segued into voicing commercials for a Los Angeles sports radio station. Her work in that medium continued after she married and settled down on a horse ranch in Nevada as June C. Sebastian.
In 1957, June headlined as a juvenile delinquent in her first feature: Roger Corman's Teenage Doll (1957). Corman liked her performance and this paved the way to further leads in teen exploitation flics like Sorority Girl (1957), Hot Car Girl (1958) and the interminable titled The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957). Her stock-in-trade characters were usually naive girls caught up in bad company or unjustly accused. June attracted some scream queen notice in Bert I. Gordon's sub-zero budget Dr. Cyclops (1940) pastiche Attack of the Puppet People (1958) and in the even sillier Earth vs the Spider (1958). With this resume, it was somehow inevitable that she would end up being typecast as a B-movie actress. Unable to break out of the mould and obtain better roles, June's career took a turn for the worse after her final starring fling (in Bloodlust! (1961), an inferior reworking of Richard Connell's İnsan Avcısı (1932) ) was universally panned by critics and audiences alike. By 1962, she seems to have lost heart, abandoned acting and segued into voicing commercials for a Los Angeles sports radio station. Her work in that medium continued after she married and settled down on a horse ranch in Nevada as June C. Sebastian.
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