For her efforts on Name, Saint James earned an Emmy Award.
#Susan st james series#
When, in 1968, Fame spawned the NBC-TV “ wheel series” series The Name of the Game, Saint James stepped back into her “Girl Friday” role, with her mini-skirted and go-go-booted Peggy becoming the only regular player in a series that alternated male protagonists (among them Gene Barry, Robert Stack, and Franciosa) on a weekly basis, everyone playing characters employed by a magazine corporation. Saint James appeared as Franciosa’s feisty, resourceful editorial assistant, Peggy Maxwell. She read the next day and Universal promptly signed her to a World Premiere film, Fame Is the Name of the Game” (1966), which featured Tony Franciosa as an investigative reporter obsessed with solving the murder of a call girl. Saint James did have something important going for her, in addition to beauty: chutzpah.Īfter relocating to Hollywood, Hano recalled, she took half a dozen acting classes, and then “barged her way into Universal’s casting office, demanding a reading. Only one thing stood in her way: she couldn’t sing.” Regardless, the newly minted Ms. Instead, she beelined it back to Gay Paree “to try out a career as a singer.
#Susan st james tv#
She lasted one week,” noted TV Guide writer Arnold Hano, “changed her name and went to New York to model.” The modeling bug didn’t take, though.
She came back wriggling like Brigitte Bardot, so the Millers enrolled her at Connecticut College for Women.
He sent her to Paris to round out her high school education. But “her father had bigger things in mind.
#Susan st james movie#
“he dreamed of becoming a movie star when she wasn’t dreaming of becoming a nun,” the magazine explained, noting that she’d been raised Catholic. Back when I was attending an all-boys high school, could claim few friends, and suffered with terrible hay fever every summer, but could always rely on Saint James’ brilliant grin to lift me from my doldrums, if only for 90 minutes at a stretch.Īccording to a 1973 cover story in TV Guide, the actress was born Susan Jane Miller, the daughter of a well-to-do Rockford, Illinois, toy manufacturer. Zounds! Could it really have been so long ago that I originally sat, enraptured, in front of my family’s too-tiny black-and-white TV set, watching a 20-something Saint James play Sally McMillan, the sexy, slightly ditzy, and peril-attracting spouse of San Francisco defense attorney-turned-police commissioner Stewart “Mac” McMillan (Hudson)? It seems like just yesterday. The same Susan Saint James, by the way, who turns 60 years old today. Yes, that Susan Saint James-the “Wife” in McMillan & Wife, one of the first three rotating series that comprised the NBC Mystery Movie.
But then, I surmised, if anyone could appreciate the real me, it had to be the woman of my youthful dreams, Susan Saint James. I didn’t live in Los Angeles, and I wasn’t Rock Hudson.
Of course, this match was doomed from the very outset. A slender, lovely brunette with a make-you-forget-your-name smile and an imperfect, smoky voice that only managed to increase her appeal. No, I fell hard for a woman more than 10 years my senior. Every guy has his first teenage crush, only mine wasn’t over some female classmate still squirming with the unfamiliarity of a bra and getting used to the attention she attracted in hot pants (this was the early 1970s, after all).
0 kommentar(er)
