Joan P. Holloway Harris is a fictional character on the AMC television series Mad Men (2007–2015). She is portrayed by Christina Hendricks.
Hendricks has received six consecutive Primetime Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series and has won two Critics' Choice Television Award for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her performance. She has also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series twice along with the cast of Mad Men.
Fictional character biography
Early life and education
Joan Holloway (born February 24, 1931) was raised in Spokane, Washington, by Gail Holloway, a single mother. She attended college in Boston.
Sterling Cooper
From season 1 through season 3, Joan is the office manager at the advertising agency Sterling Cooper. Her primary responsibilities are to manage the secretarial, steno, and telephone operators pools; attend to the needs of the executives; and organize agency events. She is also seen during meetings with the heads of departments, implementing Robert's Rules of Order, taking notes, and reminding the male staff of their duties to their clients, and assisting creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm) and CFO Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) with Sterling Cooper financial duties.
Joan is also the original supervisor of Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), who starts at Sterling Cooper as a secretary and eventually becomes a copywriter. Joan and Peggy do not get along at first; Joan is contemptuous of Peggy's demure attitude and conservative dress, while Peggy is intimidated by Joan's beauty and assertiveness. Over the course of the series, however, the two become good friends, and support each other through their personal and professional struggles, with Joan being supportive of Peggy's evolution as a copywriter in the male-dominated culture of advertising.
Joan is a hyper-feminine and charming woman, with a pragmatic view of sex and attraction. Though skilled in her career, her ultimate goal is to find a promising and devoted man to marry, and then become the strength and motivation supporting him behind the scenes as he achieves success. To this end, Joan has carefully prepared and practiced, learning the social and housewife skills necessary to be a helpful, upper-class partner, while maintaining a beautiful appearance through self care. She has many playful affairs with powerful men who adore her, but whom she discounts as marriage material. They have already achieved their success, and with most of them being married, do not fit her romantic ideal of devoted husband. Joan has little desire to be a trophy second wife.
Joan had a lengthy romantic involvement with Roger Sterling (John Slattery), which started when she was his secretary, cooled when she rose to office manager, and ended after Roger's heart attack. After Marilyn Monroe's death, Roger walks into his office to find Joan lying on his couch and crying. Realizing she is upset over the similarities she sees between the actress's life and her own, Roger comforts Joan by assuring her she will not end up alone and in despair like Monroe.
Sometime before the start of the series, Joan was briefly married to a man named Scotty. Though Scotty is never seen, she mentioned to a friend in the season 6 episode "To Have and To Hold" that her marriage to him was the "worst six months of my life."
Joan had also had an intimate relationship with copywriter Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis) sometime before the series began. Joan ended the relationship because Paul had "a big mouth," implying that he bragged about the relationship to others. Her roommate, Carol (Kate Norby), who Joan knows from college, expresses romantic interest in Joan in the episode "The Long Weekend," although Joan gently rebuffs her advances.
In season 2, Joan becomes engaged to Greg Harris (Samuel Page), a resident physician at St. Luke's Hospital. Joan is in a difficult place when it comes to marrying Greg, as she struggles to balance both her sassy, independent personality and the traditional vulnerability of a woman being dependent on her husband. As the season goes on, Joan is clearly torn between wanting to be a well-off, married woman (the pinnacle of her ambition) and the fear that she will become a bored, lonely housewife. Joan chose Greg over the stereotypical rich men she has affairs with because he is handsome and a promising young doctor just about to launch his career as a surgeon. Greg needs her support, and seems like a good bet that he'll become a successful, romantic, and devoted husband. He turns out to be a poor choice, when his delicate ego, anger issues, and sense of entitlement clash with his utter lack of professional skill, preventing him from being either a successful husband, or a successful doctor.
Her mixed feelings about her future are exacerbated when she is briefly given additional responsibilities at Sterling Cooper reading television scripts to determine ad placement, which thrills her. However, Media Director Harry Crane (Rich Sommer) ultimately hires a young, unqualified man to take over the ad placement job, to her disappointment.
In "The Mountain King," Greg meets Joan at Sterling Cooper to take her on a dinner date. Joan introduces him to Roger for the first time, and Greg picks up on the fact that Roger knows Joan's likes and dislikes. Joan attempts to dismiss his suspicions by claiming that Roger only knows her well because of how long she has been with the agency. As she's locking up for the day, Greg follows Joan into Don's office, closes the door behind him, and tries to convince her to be intimate with him. When she playfully declines, he forces her to the floor and rapes her.
When season 3 premieres, Joan and Greg have recently married, and she's preparing to leave her job to become a housewife just as soon as Greg is promoted to chief resident. In "My Old Kentucky Home," they host a dinner party with Greg's colleagues where Joan learns that not only has he not made chief resident, but that his skill — and thus his future — as a surgeon is in question. Nonetheless, she leaves her job at Sterling Cooper as planned. Not long after, accounts executive Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) runs into Joan at Bonwit Teller, where he's surprised to find her working as a shop assistant. Clearly embarrassed, Joan lies and says that Greg is considering going into psychiatry, so she needed to work a little longer while he continued his training.
Joan helps Greg prepare for a job interview, but he fails to get the job. The two have a heated argument, ending with Joan smashing a vase over Greg's head after he says she'll never understand wanting and planning for something she always expected to get, and then realizing she'll never get it. Joan later places a call to Roger Sterling's office after hours, asking him to help her find another office manager job. Greg ultimately obtains an officer's commission in the Army where he will serve as a military surgeon, and tells Joan she will no longer have to work. Despite this, Joan comes to the aid of Don, Roger, Lane, and Bert Cooper (Robert Morse) to launch the new Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce by finding accounting materials and client records. When the new company sets up shop at The Pierre hotel, Joan takes the position of office manager.
Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (SCDP) Joan is considered by most of the staff to be integral to SCDP's daily operations. Her new office, which serves chiefly as a thoroughfare rather than a private workspace, contains an intercom linked to the conference room. While the intercom allows her to listen in on meetings, this capability is known only to her and Peggy.
She encounters sexual harassment, misogyny and sexist jokes from freelancing artist Joey Baird, who shows her little to no respect, telling others she has no talent and sleeps her way to the top. However, she refuses to reprimand or terminate him, as she feels it will make her appear to be difficult to work with and weak to her male colleagues. Peggy eventually fires Joey, but Joan doesn't thank her and tells her she did it for her own satisfaction.
In season 4, Joan and Greg are shown trying to conceive a child, but their marriage is strained by Greg going to basic training and later being sent to Vietnam. While he's gone, Joan and Roger have a friendly dinner, but are robbed at gunpoint on the walk home and have a brief one-night stand that leads to Joan getting pregnant. She plans to get an abortion, and Roger insists on paying for it. She travels to a clinic for the procedure, as she waits to be called in, she's mistaken for a mother of a teen daughter getting an abortion. Joan continues with the pregnancy and lets Greg believe the child is his.
At the end of season 4, Joan is promoted to director of agency operations, in recognition of her role in keeping SCDP afloat amid its recent financial troubles. However, it is in title only, without a raise in pay.
At the start of season 5, Joan has recently given birth to a boy named Kevin and is nearing the end of her maternity leave from SCDP. Her mother, Gail (Christine Estabrook), is staying with her to help with the baby while Greg is away in Vietnam.
In "Mystery Date," Greg returns home on furlough from Vietnam, but informs Joan he is being ordered to go back for an additional year. However, at a dinner with Greg's parents, Joan learns he reenlisted voluntarily since the army makes him feel powerful and it is likely the only place where his abysmal surgical skills would be accepted. Joan becomes enraged and throws him out. Joan tells him he has never been a good man, alluding to his rape. He threatens to divorce her if he leaves, but Joan simply tells him to leave.
In "Christmas Waltz," a process server shows up at the SCDP office to serve Joan with divorce papers, which upsets her. Joan yells at SCDP's receptionist, Meredith (Stephanie Drake), and storms off. Don offers to take her out for the day and the two test drive a Jaguar. They spend the remainder of the afternoon drinking in a midtown bar, and she confesses to Don that she is unsure of how to start over with a baby. While Don and Joan are flirty with each other, the relationship between the two remains platonic.
In "The Other Woman," Joan is taken aback when Pete approaches her with a proposition to sleep with Herb Rennet (Gary Basaraba) in order to secure the Jaguar account for SCDP. She asks if all the partners are on board with this request, and Pete lies and says yes, even though Don objected, and that they are offering her $50,000. Lane, concerned that his embezzlement might be discovered if they try to pay Joan the cash, recommends privately that she demand a voting partnership and 5% of SCDP instead. Joan agrees to the request on the condition she be made partner, as Lane suggested. It's not until after her rendezvous with Herb that she learns Don was actually the one dissenting partner.