Constance Worth (19 August 1912 – 18 October 1963) was an Australian actress who became a Hollywood star in the late 1930s.
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She was born Jocelyn Howarth in Sydney, New South Wales. She was also known as “Joy.”[1][2] She attended Ascham School Sydney before developing a career on stage in Australia and New Zealand with J. C. Williamson Ltd.[3][4]
As Jocelyn Howarth, she experienced success in Ken Hall’s films The Squatter’s Daughter (1933) and The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934). Cinesound paid for her to tour Australia as their rising star.[5] Ken Hall claimed Howarth’s first screen test showed “light and shade, good diction, no accent and (that) she undoubtedly could act with no sign of the self-consciousness which almost always characterised the amateur.”[6] In late 1933, Smith's Weekly raved enthusiastically about the young actress; "Young Joy Howarth who leapt into publicity when she became the Squatter's Daughter a few months ago, is just the big hit nowadays, and even George Fuller's "out every night" story pales into significance besides Joy's record of parties.”[7]
In April 1936 she sailed for the United States and Hollywood. In October 1936 she signed a contract with RKO, taking the leading female roles as Constance Worth, in China Passage and Windjammer, both made in 1937.[8] RKO offered her no more films, and for the next twelve years she appeared in a mix of supporting and leading roles in a number of mostly B films. In 1941 she appeared in an uncredited minor role in Alfred Hitchock’s Suspicion, and in the same year, a leading role in the gangster B film Borrowed Hero. Her last film was a minor role in the 1949 Johnny Mack Brown western Western Renegades.
In May 1937 she married US actor George Brent, but after only a few weeks they separated, and a divorce was granted the same year. The marriage and drama of the divorce attracted enormous newspaper publicity in Australia.[9] Denis O’Brien comments that even in 1939 “the Weekly was still dredging the Howarth saga” in its report on her latest film Mystery of the White Room (1939).[10]
In January 1946 she was again in newspapers, cited in divorce proceedings by the wife of Hollywood scriptwriter W. A. Pierce. Both denied any impropriety, but within a year of his divorce they married.[11]
In 1947 Australian newspapers reported that she had been severely injured in a car accident and had undergone plastic surgery.[12] Constance Worth died, aged 51, in Hollywood on 18 October 1963, an “ordinary housewife”, reportedly from anemia. Ken Hall remarked "unhappy circumstances" surrounded her death.[13]
She is occasionally mistaken for a British silent era film actress of the same name, active 1919-1922.[14]
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