| Notes |
- Rocky Mountain News (CO)
April 24, 2003
Barbara Jean Byrne: AUTHOR AND ACTRESS BYRNE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR ADVENTURE
By the time she was 10 years old, the little girl named Jean had been around the world several times. On each trip, she brought along a little girl named Barbara.
"Jean was a little girl who had no mother or father," began a series of books written in Barbara Jean Engstrom's bedroom - a series that took readers to dozens of countries the young author had only visited in her mind. "I know you wish you could visit these places. Maybe you have."
"It's all just from her imagination. She was always one to embellish stories whenever she told one," said B.J. Byrne's daughter, Kris Espinosa, as she flipped through one of her mother's old manuscripts, called Jean in Japan.
"This is definitely her," Espinosa said. "She always wanted to have adventures in places she'd never been, meet people she'd never met and do things she'd never done."
Barbara Jean Byrne died March 24 in Ajijic, Mexico, of complications related to emphysema. She was 79.
"B.J." as she was almost always known, was born in Colorado Springs. Her mother divorced and remarried when Mrs. Byrne was very young, and she spent much of her childhood trying to entertain (and upstage) her younger twin sisters, Janice and Joan.
Since she never knew her biological father, Mrs. Byrne invented one. She continued her escapes through the "Jean" books. She began acting, and never stopped.
After graduating from East High School, she attended acting school in New York City. Several radio programs followed, along with appearances on local commercials and bit parts in televisions shows that included The Donna Reed Show and Wagon Train, her family said.
In the 1950s, she married and moved to Pasadena, Calif., and helped found the Little Rep Theater. After divorcing twice, she moved back to Colorado in the 1970s and married District Judge Ed Byrne. In 1975, the couple retired to the tiny town of Ajijic. There she helped start another local theater, helping to bridge languages and cultures, and lived the book she never wrote: Jean in Mexico.
Wherever she went, the actress never lost the imagination that first surfaced in the childhood stories she wrote, family members said. Despite her rosy outlook, however, she fought real battles - including one with alcoholism, a battle she eventually won, her daughter said.
"She said, 'There's never a challenge that can't be overcome,' " Espinosa said. "She never saw a hardship - she only saw another adventure."
|
1924 - 2003 (79 years)
[1, 2, 3] 
