Joanna Kerns, the Growing Pains mother who built a second career behind the camera

Joanna Kerns

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	February 12, 1953 San Francisco, California, United States
Occupation	Actress and television director
Known for	Girl, Interrupted, Knocked Up, Coma

For seven seasons Joanna Kerns played the mother who went back to work. Maggie Seaver, the reporter at the centre of Growing Pains, returned to the newsroom while her psychiatrist husband moved his practice into the house, and a generation of viewers decided that this was simply who Kerns was. What she did when the show ended is the more revealing story. She went back to work as well, on the other side of the camera, and she has now spent far longer directing other people’s television than she ever spent starring in her own.

That second career rarely makes the nostalgia pieces. Her directing credits run from Dawson’s Creek and Grey’s Anatomy to This Is Us, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series and the revived Night Court. The tally is close to seventy episodes of television, and her work on Hulu’s Light as a Feather brought her a Daytime Emmy nomination.

She came from a family that measured itself in competition. Joanna Crussie DeVarona was born in San Francisco on February 12, 1953; her older sister is the Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona, and Kerns herself competed in gymnastics at the 1968 Olympic trials, finishing 14th out of 28. Their aunt was the silent-film actress Miriam Cooper. Dance took her to UCLA, and an advertisement for Clown Around, a Gene Kelly production, took her out of it: accepting the part meant leaving college and moving to New York.

New York gave her the stage. She worked with the New York Shakespeare Festival in Two Gentlemen of Verona and appeared in Ulysses in Nighttown, where Burgess Meredith directed her and sent her to study with the acting teacher Peggy Feury. In 1972 she was back in California, dancing backup at Disneyland and chasing commercials. The rest of the decade was guest work on Charlie’s Angels, CHiPs, Starsky & Hutch, Three’s Company, Hill Street Blues and Magnum, P.I. “I kind of was always looking for the next thing,” she said later. “I auditioned for anything, hoping to get a big break.”

The first steady job came in 1983 with The Four Seasons, a CBS sitcom adapted from the 1981 film, which lasted a single season but convinced producers she could carry a lead. Then came the audition opposite Alan Thicke for a new ABC family comedy, during which she kissed him on the nose by accident, a story both of them told for years as proof of instant chemistry. Growing Pains ran from 1985 to 1992 across 166 episodes, with Kirk Cameron, Tracey Gold and Jeremy Miller as the Seaver children. Off camera she and Thicke became close friends. While the show was still on the air she directed one of its episodes, and by her own account she was hooked.

Her television films of those years pulled hard against the sitcom image. In The Nightman, in 1992, she played a sexually forward motel owner, a role that unsettled viewers who wanted the Seaver mother back; Shameful Secrets and No One Could Protect Her followed. Seen now, they read as an actress testing how far the public would follow her away from Maggie.

The move to directing was deliberate. “When I was acting, I was always fascinated by the difference in the quality of work by what director I had,” she told Variety. Her agent warned her she would have to choose: television directors book far ahead, and no producer wants one who might leave for an acting job. She chose, and she has been blunt about the timing: “I did it at the right time because I was aging out in that big black hole for women. There’s a lack of good roles for women between 40 and 60.” From the late 1990s her name turned up on Ally McBeal, Felicity, Scrubs, Psych, Pretty Little Liars, Switched at Birth, The Goldbergs, The Good Doctor and FBI. Acting kept a smaller corner: the mother of Winona Ryder’s character in Girl, Interrupted in 1999, the mother of Katherine Heigl’s Alison in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up in 2007, and Maggie again in the reunion films of 2000 and 2004.

There is a harder entry in the record. In 2004 Kerns was among the people who wrote to the court in support of Brian Peck, who had worked on Growing Pains, before his sentencing for sexually abusing a minor, later revealed to be the actor Drake Bell. “I can only believe that there must have been some extreme situation or temptation exerted upon him to influence his actions,” she wrote. When the letters resurfaced in the 2024 docuseries Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, she gave a statement that was included in it: “I have now learned that my letter of support was based on complete misinformation. Knowing what I know now, I never would have written the letter.” The retraction is unambiguous. The original sentence, which went looking for an outside pressure on the abuser rather than at what he had done to a teenager, is the part that has stayed attached to her name, and the warm television mother does not erase it.

Her health became public on her own terms. In November 2016 a contrast mammogram found ductal carcinoma in situ, and after two lumpectomies she chose a bilateral mastectomy that December rather than risk radiation and a recurrence. She had found her breast surgeon on the recommendation of Christina Applegate, whom she directed on Samantha Who?, and in a first-person essay for TODAY she explained the choice plainly: “I did not want to live in fear.” Barely a week after the operation, Thicke died suddenly. By late 2017 she had been given the all-clear. The subject has since found its way into her producing work: she is an executive producer of Love, Danielle, a 2024 dramedy co-written by and starring Devin Sidell about a woman with a BRCA mutation weighing preventive surgery.

Away from the set, Kerns married the commercial producer Richard Kerns in 1976; they had a daughter, Ashley, and divorced in 1985. In 1994 she married the Los Angeles architect Marc Appleton, and she filed for divorce in 2019. She co-founded the Women in Film Crystal + Lucy Awards.

The directing has not stopped. She took three episodes of the Night Court revival in 2023 and, in 2024, an episode of Happy’s Place, the NBC comedy built around Reba McEntire. The Growing Pains family keeps getting smaller: in October 2026 Betty McGuire, who played Maggie’s mother Kate Malone, died at 100. Kerns has no new project announced, and in her own telling that is a question of bookings rather than retirement. Asked whether she would act again, she answered without hesitation: “I love acting. I’m around.”

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Tags: actors, actresses, Grey's Anatomy, Growing Pains, Joanna Kerns, Alan Thicke

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