From the Tiger Beat Archives, September 1967
I guess I’m one of the few kids who can say they grew up in the movies. Movies and television are so much part of my life now I don’t know if I could live without them.
My family moved from England to Canada right after I was born. They wanted to come to the United States and that was the quickest way. We moved to Southern California when I was three. That’s when my career started. One of our neighbors told mom she ought to put my sister and me into children’s modeling. We did lots of commercials and things, and somebody saw me and asked mom to bring me down to the studio for a casting interview.
MY FIRST MOVIE
I got the part of Paul Newman’s daughter in “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” my first movie. After that I still modeled, but I got a lot of small movie parts, too.
Then the best thing in my life happened. I had been on the cover of a national women’s magazine and Danny Thomas saw me. He chose me for the part of his daughter on his new TV show. Those were some of the best years of my life. He was almost like a real father to me because, after all I saw him much more than I did my real father at home. I really cried at the farewell dinner when the show finally closed; I was afraid I wouldn’t see him much more. We’ve kept in pretty close touch through the years, though. The whole cast is going to film a special, “Rusty’s Wedding” pretty soon and we’ll all be working together again.
After the Danny Thomas Show I got the part in “The Sound of Music.” This is one of the best things that’s happened to me because we all got to fly to Austria on this big plane the studio chartered. The only people on it were people who were in the film so it was like one big family. Best of all, my very best friend, Heather Menzies, was in the picture, too, so we got to be together all of the time.
LOST IN SPACE
I’m in my third year on “Lost in Space” now, and it’s been a fun thing to do. The only thing I would like to change is my uniform because I have to wear the same thing all the time.
I’ve only attended regular school for thirteen weeks my whole life. The rest of the time I’ve gone to studio school, which is either a lot of fun or a complete drag.
The only kids who go to studio school are kids who are working on a movie at that time, which means that you may be all alone or there may be twenty other kids in your class. It changes from day-to-day. Most the time, though, you’re all alone, and that isn’t much fun, even if you have a nice teacher.
One of the best parts of being an actress is reading the fan letters. I really enjoy mine, and I’ve made several very close friends from them.
I even discovered a relative in a fan letter! You see, I had this cousin in England that I didn’t know about. She sent me our family tree in a letter and we became very good pen pals.
Sometimes embarrassing things happen to me because I’m an actress. Like the time I went to this party where there were hundreds of people. I saw this boy I had worked with a long time before and we said hello. We were only together for about three minutes. Well, some photographer took our picture and spread it all over that we were going together. For a long time after that it seems like whenever I opened a fan magazine there was that picture–and we weren’t even good friends! I wasn’t interested in him as a boyfriend, but it would’ve been a lot worse if I had been!
There are lots of fun things to being an actress, but there’s a lot of things that aren’t so much fun, too. Even so, I don’t think I could ever give it up. For me, movies are my life!
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