Shirley Jones is much more than just Shirley Partridge, the matriarch of The Partridge Family. She’s a triple threat—star of film, stage and television.

Though best known as Shirley Partridge, the widowed mother of five children in the situation-comedy television series The Partridge Family (1970–1974), co-starring her real-life stepson David Cassidy, son of Jack Cassidy, Shirley was a star on Broadway and in the movies before taking the television role.

She said she accepted the role of Shirley Partridge over the role of Carol Brady of The Brady Bunch because she liked that Shirley Partridge worked and Carol Brady didn’t.

As a star on Broadway, she became the first, and only singer, to be put under personal contract with Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II.

Shirley recalled some of her starring roles in Oklahoma!, The Music Man and Carousel. She told me that Frank Sinatra was offered the Harold Hill role in The Music Man movie, but Meredith Wilson, the composer of The Music Man, insisted on Robert Preston. Wilson eventually won out.

If you’re a fan of musical theater, movies or TV, you won’t want to miss this interview.