Shirley Jones

Oh, come on, do I really have to explain who this is?

Shirley Jones was a breakout star on Broadway when she appeared in Rodgers and Hammerstein's South Pacific in 1953. It quickly led to roles in movie musicals, playing innocent types in films like 1956's Carousel and 1962's The Music Man, in which she played the innocent Marian Paroo. She got to sing "Till There Was You" in the film (a year before the Beatles covered it), but Shirley Jones could also play fallen women, such as the fallen woman Lulu Bains in 1960's evangelical drama Elmer Gantry, which won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar.  She also played Elizabeth Martan in The Courtship of Eddie's Father, which paired her again with the child actor (now film director) Ron Howard, who had played Marina's brother in The Music Man.

Her greatest fame, of course, came in the seventies, as Shirley Partridge in the TV series "The Partridge Family," a sitcom based on the real-life singing family the Cowsills.  On the show, the Partridge Family would play various gigs, driving around in a Piet Mondrian-styled school bus.  Although they were a purely fictional group, the cast of "The Partridge Family" recorded actual records under that name, and many of them were hits - which propelled the teen-idol career of Ms. Jones' stepson David Cassidy, who played Keith Partridge.

In fact, the real-life family of  Shirley Jones and her husband, Jack Cassidy, had two sons together, Shaun (who followed David into a teen-idol career), and Patrick, who became an actor.   Jack Cassidy was to entertainment what Joe Kennedy was to politics - an old-school Irish patriarch.  Sadly, he had numerous personal problems that led him and Shirley Jones to divorce, and he died in a fire in 1976. Shirley Jones married comedian and agent Marty Ingels, who was known for his eccentric personality, in 1977, and they remained married until his death in 2015.

Since the seventies ended, Shirley Jones has remained busy, appearing in numerous TV shows and movies and even returning to the theater in different roles in the musicals she had once done in Hollywood - two of them with her son Patrick.  Her status as a legend is well secured.