Jean Alexander began her acting career while in high school in Rochester. Soon after graduation she joined Stanley Woolf's Civic Drama Guild of New York for a car-and-truck tour of "Junior Miss" (1945) and just months after WWII she was touring the South Pacific in "Petticoat Fever" with the USO. In New York, she trained as an actor with such luminaries as Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, and became a Lifetime Member of the Actors Studio in 1951.