Nance Crawford

The Tip of the Iceberg

 Let's get this straight. I am not the Nancy Crawford, age 17, immortalized as the Centerfold in the April, 1959, issue of Playboy magazine.

 At that time, I was already a Screen Actors Guild member named Nancy Crawford, and in San Francisco.

 The Guild did not ever accept new members who were born with the same name as existing members. That passionately protected policy was later changed in the dead of night, without consulting the membership, by an exiting Board of Directors who will remain nameless here, along with the sadly ignorant informant on IMDb who subsequently robbed me of  the existing listing, my single significant credit as Jenny, kidnapped in Tales of Wells Fargo: Red Ransom by (Nasty Indian - Script and call sheet long gone). There have been added several bizarre credits I've never heard of. Nasty Indian (?Todd Hoover? - re: IMBd) was played by Pat Hogan, who became a friend and later the father of my three youngest children.

 In April, 1959, the only Dad I knew, Robert Crawford, was, along with brothers B and J, awaiting the results of their simultaneous Emmy nominations (Editor, Bob Cummings Show: Grandpa Clobbers the Air Force; Best Actor: Playhouse 90: A Child of Our Time; and Best Supporting Actor: The Rifleman).

 I was born Nancy (no middle name) Scott. I was Nancy Scott only in grammar school through high school, on my first child's birth certificate, and my first marriage certificate. I've been Nancy Crawford since age six, when I went to work as an extra because my natural father had never paid child support or much of anything else. There had been a divorce soon after my appearance. Turned out he was a serial monogamist, and eight Scott siblings joined me to witness the obsequies when he went to his Reward. More on that later.

  I was followed into the business world by brothers Bobby and Johnny - the helpless victims and performers of my first attempts at play writing, somewhere around age 11. All three of us were born funny, which is nothing to laugh at.

 My first produced play was ADVENTURES IN RIO, presented by my sixth grade graduating class at Wilshire Crest Elementary School, Los Angeles. At sixteen, my adaptation of  THE LAND OF OZ was spectacularly produced and directed by the late John Ingle (later, Edward Quartermain on GENERAL HOSPITAL until his death in September, 2012) at Hollywood High. As the annual holiday program, the production was the delight of the student body. There was a second performance for 1,500 young kids bused in from East L.A. There were a full page of generous comments and photos in the  Los Angeles Times, and a half-page of the same in the then-extant Los Angeles Mirror. My Hollywood High senior year Creative Writing project, JESSICA AND THE DEVIL, a full-length musical with classmate composer/actor Russell Horton, was produced in 1960 by the Falcon Theater in Hollywood. It got me a coffee shop lunch with the famous David Merrick (interrupted by the aforementioned Pat Hogan). Mr. Merrick decided to take on HELLO, DOLLY! instead.

 So, I got married (two kids), divorced, married again, (three more kids), was widowed, married, married (and survived to marry again).

 Credit whatever sanity I retain to my tenacious ability to write late into the night, after coming home from office work and taking care of the household. My catalog includes country songs, poems, TV and film script samples, a novel - everything lauded, nothing purchased until CreateSpace and Amazon.

 I kept plugging along, eventually joined a theater workshop, wrote plays that were presented, and well-received, as two-night "workshop productions," but were not to the taste of the Artistic Director of that theater. Nonetheless, there I met my husband, actor David Stifel (See Family and Friends link). We moved to the west end of the San Fernando Valley, where I was invited to direct local theater, and fell into acting once more.

 I am the quintessential Late Bloomer.

 Having been told I possess the youngest vocal chords of someone my age the examining doctor has ever seen, no longer fit to be a housekeeper, I have picked up the guitar again.

 I don't believe in small dreams.