Joan Severance

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Payback, 1995

Joan Severance, born December 23, 1958, in Houston, Texas, is an American actress and former fashion model.

Joan's family moved often while she was growing up. The family had to leave Libya during the Six Day War in 1967. They moved back to Houston, Texas, where Joan, at the age of 15, started modelling to make money for university. Joan attended Westbury High School while she modelled. Her aspiration was to become a veterinarian although she didn't make enough for tuition. She was then hired on at the Elite modeling agency which allowed her to travel again. It was in Paris where she would marry Eric Milan in 1977. They divorced in 1984.

It was in the late 1980s that Joan used her modeling success to start an acting career, making her debut in a small role in the first Lethal Weapon film in 1987. She usually takes the femme fatale roles in lower budget horror and murder mystery movies, most notably Lake Consequence (1993), Criminal Passion (1994) and Payback (1995). She memorably featured alongside Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder in the 1989 comedy See No Evil, Hear No Evil and had leading roles in Roger Corman's Black Scorpion (1995) (she later starred in and co-produced a sequel, Black Scorpion II: Aftershock (1997)), and The Last Seduction 2 (1999).

Her most notable role is as a villainess on the TV series Wiseguy where she played half of a brother/sister crime team (the other half was played by Kevin Spacey) to great acclaim.

Joan was on the cover of the January 1990 issue of Playboy magazine with a nude pictorial in the issue as well.

In the early 1990's, Joan appeared as 'Samantha "Sam" Dooley', the Martian Belle, in several training videos for Virtual World Entertainment alongside other actors such as Cheech Marin, "Weird Al" Yankovic, R. Lee Ermey, Judge Reinhold and others.