- Born
- Birth nameJoy Wener
- Height5′ (1.52 m)
- Cute, bubbly, and engaging blonde actress Joy Bang blithely epitomized the quintessential, free-spirited, groovy and funky late 1960s/early 1970s hippie girl, almost always playing with infectiously naughty, upbeat good humor the kind of brash young woman who's very open, unabashed, and uninhibited about her sexuality. She was born Joy Wener on June 15, 1945 in Kansas City, Missouri, and was raised by adoptive parents in New York City. Bang made her film debut in the obscure and little-seen Separation (1968). Among Joy's most memorable parts are one of the titular young women in Roger Vadim's Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971), a rock groupie in the excellent Cisco Pike (1971), Woody Allen's date who gets abducted by bikers in Play It Again, Sam (1972), and drug dealer John Lithgow's fed-up, long-suffering girlfriend in Dealing: Or the Berkeley-to-Boston Forty-Brick Lost-Bag Blues (1972). Moreover, Bang had a rare lead as a naive biology student who runs afoul of a lethal, seductive jungle-dwelling snake goddess in the bizarre Filipino fright feature Night of the Cobra Woman (1972) and contributed a nice turn as a flaky lady who gets attacked in a movie theater full of zombies in the equally offbeat horror oddity Messiah of Evil (1974) (aka Messiah of Evil). Besides her film credits, Bang also acted in TV commercials and did guest spots on such TV shows as Police Story (1973), Adam-12 (1968), Room 222 (1969), Medical Center (1969), Hawaii Five-O (1968), and Mission: Impossible (1966). Bang was at one point romantically linked with Keith Moon, the drummer for the rock group The Who. She was also in the running for the lead in the hippie road movie Thumb Tripping (1972), but the role ultimately went to Meg Foster instead. Joy Bang abruptly stopped acting in the mid-1970s and has since gone on to become a nurse who works and lives in Minnesota.- IMDb Mini Biography By: woodyanders
- SpousePaul Bang (divorced)
- Working as a nurse in Minnesota.
- "Bang" reportedly was her married name, not a stage name.
- She was an acquaintance of Arlo Guthrie in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and hung out with the people there who were later portrayed in the cast of Alice's Restaurant (1969).
- She has a son named Jacob. Her mother, Dorothy Wener, died in 2013 at the age of 100.
- She read for the part of Tooley in Travels with My Aunt (1972). Some sources report that Katharine Hepburn, who was cast in the lead, demanded that Bang be cast as Tooley and quit the production when her demand was denied by her friend George Cukor, the director of the picture, who cast the part with Cindy Williams.
- To get from one day to the next, to be alive, to talk to people, to love your love-man, that's all it amounts to. [Interview with Roger Ebert, April 18, 1971]
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