Actress Joan Severance's father was an IBM Systems Engineer and, as a child, spent her growing years travelling the world. Her family lived in the Middle East at one point and had to flee from Libya during the Six-Day War in 1967. Her family quickly moved back to the States and settled in Houston, Texas. Joan started modeling at 15 to earn money for college. Her aspiration to study veterinarian medicine was dashed when she couldn't afford the tuition money. Entering the "Miss Houston" beauty contest instead, she was spotted and eventually hired by the Elite Modeling Agency, sent to Paris, and the course of her life changed forever. Joan spent four months in Paris and married Elite model Eric Milan who then was 25. Joan and Eric subsequently separated and her divorce was final in 1984 after seven years. In the late 1980s she managed to parlay her success at modeling into an acting career. An independent, uninhibited type, her physical assets helped move Joan forward playing a number of femme fatales in lowbudget murder mysteries and horrors all in various states of undress. Playing bad girls has served Joan well over the years, her supervixens and superheroines, particularly as Roger Corman's Black Scorpion, a particular boost. Occasionally she has co-produced her film efforts such as Matter of Trust (1997) and Black Scorpion II (1997). As a change of pace, she was cast in Aaron Spelling's revival series "The Love Boat: The Next Wave" in the late 1990s.