"I was all packed up to go to Smith College to prepare for a teachers career", she said in 1920, "when an advertisement of a dramatic school caught my eye.

In 1932, the actress went into radio to direct a series of Booth Tarkington sketches that were sponsored by the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.

When she directed a play on radio, she did not believe in letting the actors sit at tables in front of microphones reading the script.

As well as acting she directed several productions and co-wrote the play Blind Mice with Vera Caspary in 1930 which was made into the film Working Girls the following year.

Lenihan served on the council of Actors' Equity Association and in 1940 was the author of a resolution, adopted by the membership, excluding from office or employment on the union's staff any Communist, Nazi, or Fascist or sympathizer.

John Corbin, reviewing the play in The New York Times, said: "Joan's moods of frank girlhood, and of a sainthood patient and proud, are rendered with consummate simplicity and graces."

Brooks Atkinson wrote in The Times that Lenihan and Katharine Cornell, who played the role later, "left their marks on the part, for both of them had something genuine to give it."

She married Frank Walker Wheeler in 1934, then vice president of the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company.