Joan Castle Joseff was living proof that not every great Hollywood story makes it to the silver screen. The prolific jewelry designer died March 24 of congestive heart failure. She was 97. Here's a look back at her life in images.
As a small town girl, Joseff moved in the 1930s to Los Angeles, where she snagged a job as a secretary to a charismatic older man, who was a maker of costume jewelry that often appeared in Hollywood films. They fell in love and married, but before their only child had his first birthday, Joseff's husband died while piloting his own airplane.
Friends advised Joseff to sell the business, which now also includes a foundry that makes parts for aerospace manufacturers, but she wouldn't. She went on to run the company with an iron will for the next 60 years – and never remarried.
The Joseff of Hollywood foundry pioneered the making of historically accurate jewelry for movies using the investment casting process. Its work appeared on Shirley Temple in The Little Princess, on Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, and on Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.
Jewelry by Joseff of Hollywood also appeared on Marilyn Monroe.
"No man is going to forget I'm a woman," J.C. (as she was known to her employees) once said, according to a 1991 book on the Joseffs, Jewelry of the Stars.
The company started doing aerospace work during World War II, and that branch kept the company sustainable. The foundry still makes brackets, handles, levers and the like for the C-17 transport and the F-18 fighter.
During the 1950s, the tail-end of Joseff of Hollywood's heyday, J.C. threw lavish Christmas parties attended by as many as 2,000 guests, who gathered around a tree dripping in Joseff jewelry.
J.C. at times dressed outlandishly. "She dyed her poodles and her hair to match the outfit," says Tina Joseff, J.C.'s daughter-in-law, who now runs the business.
Studio work waned after the 1960s, as period epics requiring elaborate jewelry gave way to contemporary settings in films.
Julian Kovacs, a salesman for a supplier to foundries, recalls watching Joseff present a paper at an industry meeting in the early 1990s. Her topic, Kovacs says, was "how to do business with the big guys – Boeing, Honeywell."
After decades of working with the motion picture industry, renting pieces to studios, J.C. and her heirs were left with a valuable legacy. Sotheby's in recent years offered to auction the collection, according to Tina Joseff. But the family wants to keep it intact, perhaps in a museum. "It's Hollywood history," Tina says. When Joan Castle Joseff died March 24 of congestive heart failure, she left behind a collection of more than three million pieces of costume jewelry made for the movies, a small foundry business, and a record as a remarkable entrepreneur.
