Career
Anderson's most famous acting role came as the resourceful receptionist Jennifer Marlowe on WKRP in Cincinnati (1978–1982). She was offered the role when producers saw the poster of her in a red bikini; a pose similar to Farrah Fawcett's. WKRP's creator, Hugh Wilson, admitted that Anderson got the part because "She had a body like Jayne Mansfield and the overall sex appeal of Marilyn Monroe." She remained on WRKP until its end in 1982, after four seasons. She and future husband Burt Reynolds made one film together, the 1983 stock-car racing comedy Stroker Ace, a box-office failure.
Shortly after her divorce from Reynolds, she appeared as a regular in the final season (1993–1994) on the NBC sitcom Nurses. Anderson portrayed 1950s actress/sex symbol Jayne Mansfield in a made-for-TV biopic, The Jayne Mansfield Story in 1980, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mansfield's husband, Mickey Hargitay. She teamed with Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter in a 1984 television series, Partners in Crime.
Anderson made a series of cameo appearances on television shows in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as the Spellmans' "witch-trash" cousin on Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Vallery Irons' mother on V.I.P.. In 1991, she played the 1930s comedienne actress, Thelma Todd, in the TV movie White Hot: The Mysterious Murder of Thelma Todd.
Read more about this topic: Loni Anderson
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“It is a great many years since at the outset of my career I had to think seriously what life had to offer that was worth having. I came to the conclusion that the chief good for me was freedom to learn, think, and say what I pleased, when I pleased. I have acted on that conviction... and though strongly, and perhaps wisely, warned that I should probably come to grief, I am entirely satisfied with the results of the line of action I have adopted.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)