Biography
Donna Consuelos Wilkes was born on November 14, 1958 in New York City. She was born in Spanish Harlem to Spanish/French mother and Irish father. Her father was a doctor and her mother was a nightclub singer. They divorced when she was 3 months old. When she was six she made her first commercial, for Keds Tennis sneakers. She trained in acting at Dominica American Theatre of Performing Arts, but stopped her training at age 11 to become a "normal student." At age 12, she went to live with her aunt and uncle in the Dominican Republic. Being a good student at high school, she skipped a few grades, graduating at the Collegio Santo Domingo at the age of 14. At age 15, she moved to Los Angeles, California, but, unable to work at such a young age, convinced many employers that she was 18 and married. Her first jobs included being a computer operator for an ambulance service, and secretarial work for a large corporation in Culver City, adding up to 16 hours a day for 5 days a week.
She began acting again at age 17. Her first role was the part of Meredith in the 1978 Universal Pictures film Almost Summer, which also starred Tim Matheson and Didi Conn, on which she earned a SAG card. At around age 18, she became married to Billy Gray, famous for his work on Father Knows Best. At 39, Gray was 21 years older, and the marriage didn't last long. She won the role of Pamela Prentiss on the Soap opera Days of our lives which she played from 1983 to 1984. Her role was supposed to be for longer but had to be cut short when she became involved in the production of Angel.
Her best known role was in the 1984 cult classic sexploitation film Angel in which she played Molly Stewart/Angel, a high school honour student by day, and a prostitute by night. On a budget of $3 million, it was a box office success gathering $17,488,564. It spawned 3 unsuccessful sequels in which Wilkes had no involvement. She was actually 25 at the time she played the 15-year-old. To prepare for the role she spent time in halfway houses and rehabilitation centers in LA. "I actually walked on the streets with these girls and talked with them... and I also talked to the people with the group called Children of the Night, and to the Hollywood Police Department, too."
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Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
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“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)