Jean Parker was born Lois Mae Green in 1915, the daughter of Lewis Green, a gunsmith and hunter, and Pearl Melvina Burch, later known professionally as Mildred Brenner, one of 18 children of a pioneer family that had migrated to Montana from Missouri and Iowa. Her maternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister.
Jean Parker was an accomplished gymnast and dancer, and was adopted by the Spickard family of Pasadena during her formative years when both her father and mother were unemployed during the Great Depression. As Lois Green, she entered a poster-painting contest and won for portraying Father Time. Ida Koverman, assistant to MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer, heard about the contest and contacted the young winner, offering her an MGM contract.
Jean Parker went on to make several important films in her career, including The Ghost Goes West (1935) with Robert Donat, Sequoia (1934) with Russell Hardie, shot in the Sequoia National Forest near Springville, California, Little Women (1933) with Joan Bennett and Katharine Hepburn, Operator 13 (1934) with Marion Davies, and many other films.
After several successful cross-country trips entertaining injured servicemen during World War II, Jean Parker married and divorced Curt Grotter of the Braille Institute in Los Angeles, and then moved to New York to star in the play "Loco". She also starred on Broadway in "Burlesque" with Bert Lahr, and in the hit "Born Yesterday", filling in for Judy Holliday. Jean Parker's fourth and last husband, actor Robert Lowery, played opposite her as Brock in the play for a short stint. By this marriage, Jean Parker bore her only child, a son, Robert Lowery Hanks.
Jean Parker passed away on November 30, 2005, at the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital in Woodland Hills, California, at the age of 90, due to a stroke. She was survived by her son, Robert Lowery Hanks, and two granddaughters, Katie and Nora Hanks.
