Marcia Marcia Marcia! Actress Eve Plumb will forever be remembered for repeating her sister’s name over and over again on The Brady Bunch, but we’re willing to bet that there is a lot about the former child actress that you’re probably completely unaware of.
A lot of people tend to lump all of the Brady kids together whenever discussing The Brady Bunch, but Eve Plumb, the actress that played who played the Brady’s middle daughter, Jan Brady, was, and always will be, in a league of her own.
The Southern California native began her career in the early 60s, appearing in commercials at age seven. Soon enough, she landed guest roles on television shows such as The Virginian, The Big Valley, and Family Affair. In 1969 she was cast in the role that would prove to be the most definitive one of her acting career.
Plumb continued to portray Jan Brady until the Brady Bunch was canceled in 1974. After that iconic series came to end, Plumb kept working in television. In 1976, she played a teenage prostitute in the NBC made-for-TV film Dawn: Portrait of a Teenage Runaway. Two years later, she played Elizabeth March in the 1978 NBC miniseries Little Women.
While Plumb kept her acting career alive for many years after The Brady Bunch series ended, her role as Jan Brady would ultimately prove to be the one that audiences were most familiar with. For the next decade or so, Plumb continued to reprise that role, albeit reluctantly, in various Brady Bunch reunion series and films such as 1981s The Brady Brides and 1988s A Very Brady Christmas.
More recently, she has been spotted on the New York stage in the 2010 play Miss Abigails Guide To Dating, Mating, and Marriage. She followed that role up with appearances in two stage productions of Nora Ephron’s Same Time, Next Year, and Love, Loss, and What I Wore.
At this point in her career, however, Plumb is no longer focused on keeping her acting career alive. Instead, her professional path has taken her in an entirely different direction. Join Facts Verse as we discuss how Eve Plumb from The Brady Bunch is No Longer an Actress – Not Even Close.
Plumb Wanted More
When The Brady Bunch first debuted in 1969, fans of the series immediately fell in love with the giant, tight-knit family that they saw on their TV screens. Eve Plumb’s Jan Brady was first depicted on the show as an insecure tween who was essentially living in the shadow of her significantly more popular sister, Marcia. Throughout the seasons, however, she grew into a more self-assured and confident teen beauty.
While the show was immediately a hit with audiences, it rose to new heights following it’s cancellation in 1974 when it’s reruns began airing in syndication. At the time, Plumb decided to not participate in some of the earlier reprisals in hopes of landing more significant roles. Because of this, she was, in fact, the only Brady not to reprise her role in 1976s The Brady Bunch Variety Hour.
Now, at 64, the former child actor has grown her career in a handful of unexpected ways. She’s never quite abandoned her Brady Bunch roots, as she wouldn’t be where she is today if she hadn’t appeared on that program, but if you were under the impression that she hasn’t done much since her Jan Brady days, you’d be sorely mistaken.
Plumb, as we noted in the intro, got her start as an actor when she was barely out of preschool. At age 7, neither she nor her family expected that she would ever find success in the entertainment industry.
Speaking to Closer Weekly in 2018, Plumb said that her first taste of fame just sort of came to her unexpectedly not long after a childrens agent moved next door to her family when she was still a kid. At first, she just appeared in commercials, but it didn’t take long before she started landing roles in TV shows like The Big Valley and Lassie.
From the beginning, Plumb says that her family was very involved in her acting career. They gave her the support and guidance that she needed to succeed both on set and in terms of the behind-the-scenes business side of things.
Plumb’s father ran her career and invested her money in wise ways, while her mother always accompanied her on set every day. Unlike other parents of child actors, Plumb says that her parents never took a cent from her.
In 1969 Plumb was cast as Jan Brady. After the series ended in 1974, following it’s five-season run, Eve continued acting. While appearing in films like Nowhere, Blue Ruin, and I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, Plumb also made appearances on TV shows like The Love Boat, The Facts of Life, Fudge, Murder She Wrote, and in more recent times, That 70s Show and Blue Bloods.
As we briefly touched on earlier, Plumb eventually agreed to reprise her role as Jan Brady in several of the Brady Bunch spin-offs such as The Brady Girls Get Married, The Bradys, and A Very Brady Christmas. But even all these years later, Plumb says that it’s still hard for her to break free from her Brady role.
This is a fairly common plight for former child stars who are most closely associated with the roles that they played in their youth.
Interestingly, even though The Brady Bunch is the show that she’s most famous for appearing in, when giving an interview a couple of years on the radio program Sway in the Morning, Plumb pointed out that The Brady Bunch wasn’t regarded as being ‘relevant or interesting’ by the majority of viewers who watched it during it’s initial run.
Frankly, people didn’t find a show about a bunch of kids and their family dog to be all that relevant during the era of the Vietnam war.
Even so, the series ultimately evolved into an unexpected success story in the years that followed it’s cancellation. Not only did The Brady Bunch become one of the most iconic and emblematic shows of it’s era, but the young stars that helped make it happen became forever immortalized in their respective roles.
Post-Brady, Eve Plumb worked super hard to break free from her typecasting. She was willing to audition for just about any role that she heard about. She desperately wanted to prove that she was capable of doing things other than simply being a Brady. But not only did Plumb do her best to branch out from the Bunch in terms of her acting career, but she also continued to expand her career in several other surprising ways.
A Penchant For Painting
Anyone that watched HGTV’s A Very Brady Renovation knows that Eve Plumb is gifted with some killer art skills. In the third episode, Plumb helped Leanne and Steve Ford, the brother-sister team who are the stars of the series Restored by the Fords, recreate the Brady Kitchen and family room inside of the actual house that was used as the backdrop for the Brady family home on the original series.
You see, even though Eve Plumb continued acting after The Brady Bunch, she eventually discovered that she had a hidden passion for painting. In between acting jobs, she needed something to occupy her time and keep her mind sharp. So, when she discovered that she had a talent for art, painting became one of her most prominent creative outlets.
For the last two decades, Plumb has been working out of her studio in the New York City apartment that she shares with her beloved husband of 27 years, Ken Pace. Since picking up the paintbrush and honing her skills, Plumb’s pieces have been featured in numerous galleries around the world.
While she’s never received any formal artistic training, Plumb has gotten quite skilled at painting still lifes.
Some of Eve’s most recent works have been of fruits and food. She’s painted iconic items that depict well-known aspects of life in the Big Apple, such as Fishs Eddy bowls.
She Recently Sold Her Condo
In 2021, Pumb listed her New York City condo for $1.8 million. The 1,224-square-foot abode features two bedrooms and two bathrooms. The condo is located in the Lenox Hill neighborhood and boasts stunning views of the East River and the famed Manhattan skyline.
The condo has an open floor plan which combines kitchen, living, and dining spaces. The master bedroom comes equipped with heated floors, and the master bathroom has been fitted with a luxurious triple Toto rain shower head.
Plumb converted one of the bedrooms into an office space, but it could easily be reverted back into a living space.
In 2019, Plumb and Ken Pace sold their Upper West Side co-op for more than $700,000. Three years before that, Plumb sold her childhood home in Malibu, which she bought when she was 11, for $3.6 million.
According to IMDB, she’s slated to appear in the upcoming film Bagdad, Florida. It’s unclear if she has any other projects lined up, but it’s nice to see that she hasn’t completely turned her back on show business.
We’re just about out of time for this video, but before you go, we’d love to hear what you have to say about Eve Plumb’s Hollywood career and her various other ventures. Did you know that Eve Plumb was the only Brady to not reprise her role on The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, and that in the last two decades she’s spent the majority of her team focusing on her art career? Let us know in the comments. And as always, thanks for watching!
