Debbie Allen Looks Back on "Good Times"

[JamesG]

Playing Diana Buchanan, fiancé to Jimmy Walker’s J.J., “was my very first acting role in television in a major nighttime show. I had done Captain Kangaroo before that, but that was the first real, prime time show that I did,” Debbie Allen recalls.

“It was a big deal all the way around. I was there visiting Ralph Carter, who had played my young brother Travis in Raisin, a musical version of Raisin in the Sun, and the casting woman saw me waiting. She said, “Oh, who are you?,” and I told her I was Debbie Allen. She said, “Can you act?” I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Allen read for the part, got it, “and then it all happened,” she adds. Shooting the two-part episode “was fun, and Jimmy felt comfortable with me.”

https://tvline.com/lists/debbie-alle.../good-times-2/

[TVFactFan]

she had me convinced she was drug addict so she did a good job