Joanna Kerns
American actress and director (born 1953)
Joanna Kerns is an American actress and director best known for her role as Maggie Seaver on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains from 1985 to 1992.
Career
Early roles
Kerns got her start in show business as a dancer before turning to acting. She attended UCLA and majored in dance. There, she saw an advertisement for a Gene Kelly production called Clown Around and applied for an audition. To take the part, however, she would have to drop out of college and move to New York, which she did. After Clown Around, Joanna also got parts in the New York Shakespeare Festival's production of Two Gentlemen of Verona and Ulysses in Nighttown, where she was directed by Burgess Meredith. Meredith also introduced Kerns to Peggy Feury, under whom Kerns studied acting. In 1972, she moved back to California and landed a job as a backup dancer at Disneyland, and started auditioning for TV commercials and steady acting jobs.
On May 4, 1977, she made an appearance on Charlie's Angels as Natalie, a worker at a massage parlor in the episode "The Blue Angels".
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kerns started making a name for herself in guest spots on many televisions shows that included: Emergency!, CHiPs, The A-Team, Starsky & Hutch, Street Hawk, Laverne and Shirley, Three's Company, Hill Street Blues, The Love Boat, Hunter, Quincy, M.E., Magnum, P.I., and V, as well as many commercials.
The public source identifies “Joanna Kerns” as american actress and director (born 1953). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Joanna, Kerns and American.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q63689. VIAF identifies the subject as 19884130. The Library of Congress control number is no96043593. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 1992, 1972 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joanna Kerns” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.