1976 interview with Lindsay Wagner (Bionic Woman) [Archive] - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

catlover79

03-18-2011, 09:19 PM

The Bionic Woman was filming at a ranch in Malibu Canyon the day I went out to see Lindsay Wagner. It was quite a setting for a TV show. Mountains rose in the distance. A narrow road led out to an area of beautiful towering trees. I could see Lindsay and the camera crew working down by a stream.

The luncheon break was called soon after I arrived. Work stopped immediately. When a show is being filmed on location, the cast and crew get only 30 minutes for lunch. There was no time to waste.

Lindsay and I walked toward her trailer which was parked nearby. Her secretary went to get lunch from the catering truck. There were no hamburger chains in this remote part of Malibu Canyon!

Lindsay had been working hard, I knew, but she didn't look tired. "The show is very demanding, though," she admited, as she settled down on a comfortable couch. "I do a lot of the physical stuff myself. That makes it much harder. You wear yourself out emotionally and physically."

She smiled, and then added: "I spent several hours learning on the mini-trampoline. They hide it behind a bush, so I can run, jump, and go over it. It looks like I'm jumping in the air! Everything I've had to do has been fairly easy and fun - even though I'm not really a physically oriented person."

Lindsay hadn't really planned on doing a TV series at all, she told me. "Movies are my first love," she said. But she was asked to play a bionic woman in an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man. She almost turned it down, but then she called her mother. "My mother said, 'Oh, do it for your sister. It's her 13th birthday and that's her favorite show.' So I did the show and everything kind of snowballed from there."

Clearly, nobody had intended to do a series about the bionic woman, because they killed her off in that first episode. "After it was shown, the mail poured in," Lindsay said. "People were very upset that they'd killed off the bionic woman. One letter came from a doctor in Boston who runs a children's hospital. He said, 'Why did you create a character children would love and then kill her? You have upset these children very badly.'"

So the producers did the only thing they could. They reached into the grab bag of television fantasy - and brought the bionic woman back to life!

How could Lindsay refuse to do the series? She couldn't. "We made a deal with the studio," she admitted. "We agreed that if I would do the series, they would guarantee me a movie for every year the series ran. That way I could do both television and movies."

Lindsay knows young people are a big part of her audience. "I can understand why," she said. "It's purely fantasy. Everyone wants to be super human. I grew up with Superman and kids don't have him today. Kids are also much more aware today than we were. They know about technology. They know bionics are real. Bionics don't have the power that Jaime Sommers and Steve Austin have. But there really are artificial limbs that operate by muscle signals."

Lindsay may be in a "fantasy hit" today. But as a kid, she wasn't into science fiction at all. "I was a terrible realist," she laughed. "I'd watch King Kong and say, 'Why did they make something stupid like that?' It's funny, isn't it? I didn't begin to like science fiction until I got older. I didn't fantasize as a kid. I was not really a kid until I was 20. Then I learned to have fun!"

Lindsay was born in L.A. "I was a very successful model from the time I was 13," she recalled. "I was very tall. I looked older than I was. I was always around older people."

When she was 13, she also started taking dancing lessons. She enrolled in a ballet class. "I'd been in the class two weeks when the teacher said, 'Maybe you'd like to try my jazz class.' I tried that. Then she said, 'Maybe you'd like to try my modern interpretive dance class.' I finally said, 'Are you trying to tell me something?' She said, 'My husband has an acting class.' So I got into acting! I was graceful when I was dancing, but I was too stiff."

Acting was where she belonged. "It was perfect for me," Lindsay said. "I had been very withdrawn. But I was still young enough so that the shell around me could be broken. As long as I was playing someone else I could get my emotions out. That drama teacher, James Best*, had a great deal to do with my development."

Lindsay was the youngest student in the class. "But Jimmy was very observant and very good with children. Being in the class worked well for me."

Until acting came along, Lindsay hadn't had time to have much fun. "I wasn't really into school," she explained. "I was always concerned with other things. I took care of kids a lot. I spent the first half of my life baby-sitting! I was 7 when I was taking care of my aunt's baby. Before my sister was born, I spent time raising Glen Campbell's first child! I was only 10 then! I didn't relate to kids that didn't have responsibilities. I couldn't get into playing - I never really had time to learn!"

When she was 14, Lindsay moved to Portland, OR, with her mother and stepfather. It wasn't an easy move. She enrolled in David Douglas High School, and her mother tried to talk her into joining the high school drama class. "I was terrible," Lindsay recalled with a smile. "I said, 'Oh, Mom, I've been working with professionals.' But one day I decided to give myself a good laugh and I went to the class. To my surprise, the drama teacher was fantastic! I sat there with egg on my face. I had really been wrong! I immediately enrolled in her class and continued my work as an actress. This woman was very well known throughout the state. People came from all around when we put on a play."

Lindsay was 16 when she graduated from high school. "After graduation I went to France for three months on a kind of exchange program," she said. "I toured for several months with a student group. When I came back I decided to go to college." She attended the University of Oregon for a year, then transferred for six months to Mt. Hood Community College in Portland.

"But I really wanted to get back home to Los Angeles," Lindsay admitted. "Finally I did come back, and modeled for a year. But I got tired of doing that, so for several years I didn't do any modeling or any acting. I took other jobs. I sold clothes, I was a waitress, and so on. Finally I decided I was ready to take up my acting career. I had grown up a lot. I was feeling good about myself. I had to be ready emotionally. One thing my teacher Jimmy Best had impressed on me was that it wouldn't be easy. It would be a big emotional drain, he had said. That's why I had not been in a rush. But finally the time was right."

She called a friend who introduced her to the casting director at Universal. She got ten lines in a Marcus Welby, M.D. episode - "and a big rush of events happened," Lindsay noted. "I had to run out and get an agent!"

Within seven months she'd done 12 TV shows and appeared in the films Two People and The Paper Chase.

Today she's in a hit TV series, she has a horse named LuLu, a pure white mule named Nebbin, two cats, "and I do beautiful needlepoint," she admitted.

It's a good time for her, "but it's also a difficult time," she said. "Doing the series is very demanding. This is definitely a big growing period for me - and there is always both pain and joy to growth. You go through such times; then you look back and say - they were great! But they can be torture when you're going through them. You have to learn to cope," Lindsay added, "and so far I'm very happy with the way I've been coping. This is definitely a time I'll look back upon as being very happy."

At one point, Lindsay also tried her hand at teaching acting. "I taught sixth, seventh and eighth graders," she said. "It was fun and really exciting. The kids were so open. They wanted so much to please. I really became aware of how much you can help kids at that age with their acting. You can help bring them out so they aren't afraid to display their emotions. It helps young people to see other kids displaying emotion. They may come from homes in which their parents never show any emotion - or their parents may be very volatile and never show any tenderness."

Lindsay, as Jaime Sommers, is also a teacher when she's not off using her bionic powers. Jaime, however, can tear up telephone books, which Lindsay was never called upon to do when she was teaching acting!

"One really nice thing about The Bionic Woman is that there is very little violence," Lindsay pointed out. "The kind of violence I get into is defensive. I may throw something at someone. In one show I threw a 100-pound bale of hay. It didn't really weigh that much. I had to pretend it did. That's what acting is all about. One of the first things they teach you in acting class is how to make an empty suitcase look heavy. You have to learn how to pretend."

Lindsay and I had been chatting for some time. "Lindsay," I said as the luncheon break drew to a close. "I must ask you a very important question." She leaned back. She knew very well what the question was going to be.

"Is Jaime Sommers ever going to marry Steve Austin?"

She smiled. "No, I don't think so," she replied. But there is one consolation. On TV, you never know. They brought The Bionic Woman back to life. Maybe someday they'll let her marry The Six Million Dollar Man and raise bionic babies.

*That James Best is the very same man who would go on to play Rosco P. Coltrane on The Dukes of Hazzard. :cool: