Obituary: Joel P. Wolfe, Restaurant Lisanne founder
Joel P. Wolfe died on March 2, 2015. He was 78 years old. He was born in Brooklyn on September 19, 1936, the oldest of three sons. His father, Seymour Wolfe, was a milkman and his mother Rachel (Rae) Borrin Wolfe was a Canadian expat. His mother’s family, Jews who had emigrated from the pogroms in Polish Russia (actually Bellarus), grew up in the Jewish area of Montreal called Mile End. Although Joel spent most of his childhood in the Bronx, he spent his childhood summers in the Laurentian mountains with his Montreal relatives. He always had strong ties to his mother’s side of the family, who could tell lively stories and jokes and had the best bakers.
He found his love of fencing at City College, where he got to compete on a national level. He majored in psychology mostly because he had an enigmatic professor, Kenneth Clark, who played a pivotal role in the Brown vs. Board of Education case. After college he didn’t have a career path so he joined the Army in Fort Bragg, where he found his love of the stage and acting. After the army, Joel took several, less interesting jobs, before he met the love of his life, Sue Heacock. Sue always encouraged him to follow his dreams.
A year after they first met, they walked down the aisle — and never looked back. The atheist Jewish actor and the entrepreneurial Quaker made the perfect team. Joel and Sue moved from a studio in Yorkville to a townhouse on Adelphi St in Fort Greene in the late 1960’s. During his first career as an actor, he toured in 2 national shows, did dinner theater and summer stock, suffered through commercials — did “character roles” in some major motion pictures and shared a room with Morgan Freeman while performing a play called “Royal Hunt of the Sun”. When Joel wasn’t auditioning he would watch Julia Child on TV — that is how he fell in love with French food. With no training other than some community college courses and Julia Child, along with Jacques Pepin, Joel laid the foundation for the next phase of his life. Joel had grown disenchanted with his acting career, and had a dream of opening a French restaurant.