Shirley Patterson, sometimes billed as Shawn Smith, (December 26, 1922 – April 4, 1995) was a Canadian born B-movie

B-movie

A B movie is a low-budget commercial motion picture that is not definitively an arthouse or pornographic film. In its original usage, during the Golden Age of Hollywood, the term more precisely identified a film intended for distribution as the less-publicized, bottom half of a double feature....

 actress of the 1940s and 1950s.

Patterson began her acting career after being a beauty

Beauty

Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...

 contestant in pageant

Beauty contest

A beauty pageant or beauty contest, is a competition that mainly focuses on the physical beauty of its contestants, although such contests often incorporate personality, talent, and answers to judges' questions as judged criteria...

s in California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 in 1940. She graduated from the Mar-Ken School in Sherman Oaks, California in 1941, and shortly thereafter she signed a contract with Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures

Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. is an American film production and distribution company. Columbia Pictures now forms part of the Columbia TriStar Motion Picture Group, owned by Sony Pictures Entertainment, a subsidiary of the Japanese conglomerate Sony. It is one of the leading film companies...

. Her career spanned forty films, a small quantity of television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 appearances, and a serial

Serial (film)

Serials, more specifically known as Movie serials, Film serials or Chapter plays, were short subjects originally shown in theaters in conjunction with a feature film. They were related to pulp magazine serialized fiction...

.

A beautiful woman in her youth, Patterson played the role of heroine in the 1943 fifteen chapter Batman

Batman (serial)

Batman is a 15-chapter serial, released in 1943 by Columbia Pictures. The serial starred Lewis Wilson as Batman and Douglas Croft as Robin. J. Carrol Naish played the villain, an original character named Dr. Daka. Rounding out the cast were Shirley Patterson as Linda Page , and William Austin as...

 serial. In 1944 she starred in The Vigilantes Ride alongside Russell Hayden

Russell Hayden

Russell "Lucky" Hayden was an American film and television actor.He was born as Hayden Michael "Pate" Lucid, son of Francis J...

 and Bob Wills

Bob Wills

James Robert Wills , better known as Bob Wills, was an American Western Swing musician, songwriter, and bandleader, considered by music authorities as the co-founder of Western Swing and universally known as the pioneering King of Western Swing.Bob Wills' name will forever be associated with...

. In 1946 she accompanied Eddie Dean

Eddie Dean (singer)

Eddie Dean was an American western singer and actor whom Roy Rogers and Gene Autry termed the best cowboy singer of all time. Dean was best known for "I Dreamed Of A Hill-Billy Heaven" , which became an even greater hit in 1961 for Tex Ritter....

 and Roscoe Ates

Roscoe Ates

Roscoe Ates was an actor and musician in primarily western films and television.-Early years:Ates was born in the rural hamlet of Grange, Mississippi, northwest of Hattiesburg. Grange is no longer included on road maps...

 in the film Driftin River, and starred with them again that same year in Tumbleweed Trail. Two of her last films was the 1957 movie The Land Unknown

The Land Unknown

The Land Unknown is a sci-fi, CinemaScope adventure film about a naval expedition trapped in an Antarctic jungle. The story was allegedly inspired by the discovery of unusually warm water in Antarctica in 1947. It starred Jock Mahoney and Shirley Patterson and was directed by Virgil W. Vogel...

, and the 1958 Sci-Fi

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 film It! The Terror from Beyond Space

It! The Terror from Beyond Space

It! The Terror from Beyond Space is a 1958 black and white science fiction film directed by Edward L. Cahn.-Plot:The film opens with a nuclear-powered spaceship perched on the cratered surface of an alien world. A voice-over tells us that the year is 1973 and that this is the planet, Mars. This...

, which also starred Ray "Crash" Corrigan who played a monster from outer space

Outer space

Outer space is the void that exists between celestial bodies, including the Earth. It is not completely empty, but consists of a hard vacuum containing a low density of particles: predominantly a plasma of hydrogen and helium, as well as electromagnetic radiation, magnetic fields, and neutrinos....

.

Patterson had a long fight with cancer

Cancer

Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...

 in her later years, and died in 1995 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Fort Lauderdale is a city in the U.S. state of Florida, on the Atlantic coast. It is the county seat of Broward County. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 165,521. It is a principal city of the South Florida metropolitan area, which was home to 5,564,635 people at the 2010...

.

External links

• Shirley Patterson at b-westerns.com