Constance Worth

Constance Worth (also known as Jocelyn Howarth) (19 August 1911 – 18 October 1963) was an Australian actress who became a Hollywood star in the late 1930s.

Early life and career

She was born Enid Joyce Howarth in Sydney, youngest of three daughters of businessman Moffatt Howarth and his wife Mary Ellen (nee Dumbrell). She was also known in Australia as "Joy." She attended Ascham School and a finishing school before developing a career on stage as Jocelyn Howarth, in Australia and New Zealand with J. C. Williamson Ltd.

Film career in Australia

As Jocelyn Howarth, she experienced success in Ken Hall’s films The Squatter's Daughter (1933) and The Silence of Dean Maitland (1934). Cinesound put her under an 18 month contract and paid for her to tour Australia as their rising star.

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." 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...."

Move to Hollywood

In April 1936 she sailed for the United States and Hollywood. After six months of unsuccessful effort, including a near fatal incident with a gas stove in her flat, she signed a contract with RKO Pictures, taking the leading female roles as Constance Worth, in China Passage and Windjammer. The change of name was related to her first role with established Hollywood actor Vinton Hayworth. After Windjammer, RKO offered her no more films. Her next role was in Willis Kent's 1938 exploitation quickie, The Wages of Sin, playing a young woman lured into prostitution. For the next twelve years she appeared in a mix of leading, supporting and uncredited roles in B films. In mid 1939 she returned to act on stage in Australia, but went back to the U.S. before the end of the year. 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. Throughout her career and as late as 1961, publicity in Australia repeatedly suggested she was on the verge of signing a major studio contract again. This did not eventuate.

Personal life

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. 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).

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.

In 1947 Australian newspapers reported that she had been severely injured in a car accident and had undergone plastic surgery. Constance Worth died, aged 52, in Hollywood on 18 October 1963, an “ordinary housewife”, reportedly from anemia. Ken G. Hall remarked "unhappy circumstances" surrounded her death.

She is occasionally mistaken for a British silent era stage and film actress of the same name, active 1919–1922.