Career
Richardson first started acting in plays in high school. She graduated from Coatesville Area Senior High School in 1969, and moved to Hollywood in 1971. In the six years between moving to the West Coast and being cast on Eight is Enough, she played bit roles in the films American Graffiti and A Star is Born, and guest-starred on the television series Happy Days and The Streets of San Francisco. Shortly before her 25th birthday, Richardson was picked to play the fourth-oldest child in the Bradford family on Eight is Enough.
On March 15, 1978, Richardson married Michael Virden, and shortly thereafter became pregnant, which was also written into the show. She gave birth to their daughter, Sarah, on March 27, 1980. After her pregnancy, a rumor was spread that Richardson would lose her job if she did not shed her pregnancy weight; she had gained 90 pounds and found it very hard to slim down by normal means, so she started using cocaine as a weight loss aid, and became addicted. (She later kicked the habit.) After Eight is Enough was canceled, she started a band called Harmony, and battled potential addiction to morphine following a debilitating tailbone injury (see ).
In her Eight is Enough heyday, Richardson appeared in two installments of Battle of the Network Stars (May 1979 and December 1980), as well as numerous appearances on The $20,000 Pyramid, Password Plus, and Match Game, in addition to a one-hour All-Star episode of Family Feud in 1978 and a 3-episode celebrity tournament on the daytime version in May 1979.
As of 2000 Richardson was working as a caregiver at a retirement home in Pennsylvania.
In January 2013, The Huffington Post published a report from a National Enquirer interview with Richardson. She reported she had fallen on extremely hard times, living in an unheated trailer with a rotting floor in Wagontown, Pennsylvania, not far from her hometown of Coatesville. Richardson said she had developed diabetes, suffered several mini-strokes, and had also lost her teeth as the result of a digestive condition.
Read more about this topic: Susan Richardson
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.”
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