Q272445

Biography

Linda Melson Harrison (born July 26, 1945) is an American television and film actress. She played Nova in the science fiction film classic Planet of the Apes (1968) and the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes; she also had a cameo in Tim Burton's 2001 remake of the original. She was a regular cast member of the 1969–70 NBC television series Bracken's World. She was the second wife of film producer Richard D. Zanuck (Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory); her youngest son is producer Dean Zanuck (Road to Perdition, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).

== Early life == Linda Melson Harrison was born in Berlin, Maryland. She was the third of five daughters of Isaac Burbage Harrison, a nurseryman, and his wife, Ida Virginia Melson, a beautician. She was the middle child, with two older sisters, Kay and Gloria, and two younger sisters, Jane and Joan. The Harrisons, like Linda's maternal Melson ancestors, had a long history in the Delmarva region. According to Ancestry.com, the Melson family were mid-17th century immigrants to Maryland from Melsonby St James in North Yorkshire. The Anglo-Welsh Harrisons had been resident for generations in West Kirby, Cheshire, when one Richard Harrison, son of another Richard Harrison, emigrated in the early 17th century from West Kirby to the New Haven Colony in what is now Connecticut, thence to Maryland. Richard's descendant, Harrison's paternal grandfather, Joseph G. Harrison, and Joseph's older brother, Orlando Harrison (Mayor of Berlin 1900–1910 and 1916–1918 and Maryland State Senator for Worcester County, 1916-1928), established J.G. Harrison & Sons Nurseries, which were, at one time, the largest fruit tree nursery business in America, employing some five hundred workers. The former Harrison Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park campus, which Harrison attended briefly, was named for her paternal great-uncle, Senator Orlando Harrison. "I knew she'd be a star when she was only five," Ida Harrison told an interviewer in 1969. Mrs Harrison, who described her middle daughter as "a little ham", enrolled her in ballet and acrobatics classes at age five. By age six, Harrison was performing on stage, and liking it. She attended Berlin's Buckingham Elementary School, which her mother and all her sisters attended. In 1956, when she was eleven, Harrison's acrobatic performance earned her first prize in the Delmarva Chicken Festival Talent Contest. Six years later, at the same festival, Harrison won the "Miss Delmarva" beauty contest. By the time she entered Berlin's Stephen Decatur High School, Harrison had become a skilled acrobatic dancer. Harrison also dreamed of becoming an actress and a star. It was Harrison's plan to become an actress by entering and winning beauty contests, then travel to California to be seen and noticed. When she was in her teens, Harrison worked summers as a waitress at Phillips Crab House in Ocean City, Maryland; she was dating the son of the restaurant's owners when she flew to California for the Miss America beauty contest. From time to time, she appeared as a narrator on local TV programs carried on Baltimore TV station WMAR. Harrison essayed her first dramatic role while attending Stephen Decatur High School, that of "Connie Fuller" in the senior class production of the 1940 Kaufman/Hart play George Washington Slept Here. On Saturday, May 19, 1962, William Hockersmith crowned her Miss Berlin at the Miss Berlin Beauty Pageant, which was held at the high school. A month later, Harrison represented her home town at the Delmarva Chicken Festival beauty contest. After graduating from high school, Harrison enrolled for a summer term at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a secretarial school in Baltimore, but found it uninspiring. When her oldest sister, Kay, graduated from college and headed for New York, Harrison went with her, with $250 and their mother's credit card. Several years later, Harrison would lament her "admittedly deficient formal education" to an interviewer, saying that she "missed a great deal because I didn't finish school."

== Career ==

=== Breaking into the industry === In New York, Kay and Linda shared an apartment and their mother Ida's credit card. Harrison scored some success as a model, but she disliked New York and was homesick for Maryland. Less than a year later, she returned home; following her plan to become an actress by winning beauty contests, she entered the 1964 Miss Delmarva beauty pageant as Miss Berlin, and won. Harrison followed her 1964 victory by entering the Miss Maryland beauty pageant, a preliminary event to the Miss America pageant, itself the final preliminary event to the Miss International contest, which would be held in Long Beach, California, in mid-June 1965. Harrison won the contest over nineteen other girls; that June, as Miss Maryland, she flew to California for the Miss America contest. She thought the trip would last for two weeks. Bidding farewell to her boyfriend, she scheduled her return home in two weeks, after she was crowned Miss America. But she was first-runner up, not the winner. Harrison was "devastated", and so deeply disappointed over losing that she wept backstage. Her striking good looks and hourglass figure, however, had gained the notice of Mike Medavoy, then an agent at the General Artist Corporation. "You ought to be in pictures," Medavoy told her. In August 1965, Medavoy obtained a "personality test" for her at 20th Century Fox. No acting was involved; Harrison answered questions directed to her from off-camera, while speaking into the camera on various subjects. The test earned her Fox's standard 60-day option agreement, scheduled to expire in November 1965. During her 60-day option period, Harrison studied with Fox acting coach, Pamela Danova. In October 1965, prior to the expiration of her option, Fox assigned Harrison as the date of studio attorney Harry E. Sokolov for the premiere of The Agony and the Ecstasy. She was selected as Sokolov's date because "Harry was from Baltimore." Harrison was excited, because it was her first premiere, and because the film co-starred Charlton Heston, who had been her idol since she had seen Ben-Hur. At the post-premiere party, which she attended with her studio-assigned date, Harrison was thrilled to meet her longtime idol, Heston, with whom she would soon co-star in Planet of the Apes. At the premiere, Harrison met Sokolov's boss, Fox's Vice President in Charge of Production Richard D. Zanuck. Zanuck, Harrison said later, was immediately "smitten" and fell "madly in love" with her, and she with him, and they began to date. Harrison's acting career, as well as her life, became inextricably intertwined with their subsequent relationship.

=== Early roles === Right after meeting Zanuck, Harrison signed Fox's standard seven-year contract in November and was placed in the studio's Talent Training School. Although Harrison told interviewers that Zanuck had created the school so "he could keep an eye on me", the school was actually a former Fox institution which Zanuck had revived to train aspiring, talented young actors and actresses under contract to Fox; besides Harrison, the student roster included Jacqueline Bisset, James Brolin, Tom Selleck and Edy Williams. Under coaches Pamela Danova and Curt Conway, Harrison attended drama classes, speech classes, fencing classes, dance and body movement classes, and lectures by veteran actors, actresses, directors, writers, publicity agents, and teachers. In addition to her strenuous round of classes, Harrison worked with a speech coach to eradicate her Eastern Maryland accent. Harrison's first assignment under her new Fox contract was as a "Biker Chick" in Men Against Evil, a TV pilot which became the TV series Felony Squad. "I had three words, "Go, man, go!" I was all of 20, and dressed in this really racy motorcycle outfit. Those were my first words! This was still the era of stardom and premieres. When you were put under a studio contract, every minute of your life was so exciting, because you were doing something so unique and special." (Three years later, Harrison co-starred as Felony Squad star Dennis Cole's love interest in the NBC TV series Bracken's World.) Harrison's next assignment was in the Batman TV series, where she appeared briefly as one of three high school cheerleaders in the episodes "The Joker Goes to School" and "He Meets His Match, The Grisly Ghoul", aired in early March 1966. To prepare Harrison for her few seconds onscreen, her Fox dance coach worked Harrison and her fellow cheerleaders early in the morning and on through the day. Linda, a former high school cheerleader, complained, "You're going to use up all my energy, so when the shot comes, I won't have any." Her coach complained that "Linda Harrison gave me a hard time." After the brief late afternoon shot, Harrison's overworked leg muscles failed on her way home, and Zanuck had to carry her upstairs to their Wilshire-Westwood apartment.

All during this period, Dick was telling me about this fabulous book called Planet of the Apes and that it was going to make a great movie. He said, "I want you to play the ape, Dr. Zira." On March 8, 1966, immediately after her brief appearance on Batman, Harrison was filmed in ape makeup for a proposed film version of Pierre Boulle's satirical novel, Monkey Planet, later released as Planet of the Apes. Zanuck had financed the test in order to show Fox's money men that, despite all doubts to the contrary, the Planet of the Apes project was feasible. The test, written by Rod Serling and directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, starred Harrison's idol, Charlton Heston, and Edward G. Robinson as Heston's nemesis, Dr. Zaius. Harrison appeared as Zira, the role ultimately played by Kim Hunter, while Harrison's Talent School classmate fellow contract actor, James Brolin, took on Roddy McDowall's role of Cornelius.

I think they always had me in mind for Nova. But they needed someone to do the screen test, and you keep trying to employ your actors. So. I did the screen test. The part that was hard for me was actually doing the mask, where they put all that plaster on your face and you have to lie there still for a long time. Fortunately, I was an acrobat growing up, and a very very good one — I won a lot of contests — so I knew how to control my body and be 'quiet'. You had to do that, you had to be very still and lay there and be a 'good patient'. A young actor will do anything to get their mug on the screen! I remember that the makeup process took about three hours. I had to lay back and be perfectly still as they put this plaster mold on my face. After seeing the test, everyone was very enthusiastic about going ahead with making Planet of the Apes. But they felt the makeup needed a little more work and perfecting before it would look good on screen. Though the ape make-up test was considered successful, the studio rejected the project again. Meanwhile, in May 1966, Harrison made her big screen debut as one of several "Treasure Hunters" in The Fat Spy. The low-budget comedy might have been forgotten had it not been mentioned in a 2004 documentary as one of The 50 Worst Movies Ever Made. Harrison's next big screen outing was in the Jerry Lewis comedy Way...Way Out; she played half of a husband-wife astronaut team on the verge of divorce. She appeared early in the film, arguing furiously, in her still-uneradicated Down Eastern accent, with her onscreen husband and off-screen Talent School classmate, James Brolin, with whom she had appeared in the Planet of the Apes makeup test.

After Way...Way Out, Harrison appeared in a four-minute test segment entitled "Who's Afraid of Diana Prince?", created by Batman producer William Dozier, which was supposed to engender interest in a Wonder Woman pilot and an eventual TV series. Harrison played a glamorous mirror image of Wonder Woman, which existed only in the imagination of the homely Diana Prince character, played by Ellie Wood Walker (Robert Walker Jr.'s wife). The "Who's Afraid of Diana Prince?" segment failed to engender any interest in a Wonder Woman pilot, although Lynda Carter had great success in the role eight years later. Harrison next appeared as Carl Reiner's blonde-wigged young inamorata "Miss Stardust" in A Guide for the Married Man (1967), a bedroom comedy about marital infidelity directed by Gene Kelly and starring Walter Matthau, Robert Morse and Inger Stevens. Harrison described her vignette with Carl Reiner as "fun" because it took her "all over the world. I was in limousines and on a donkey and on a camel." In addition to speaking one line of dialogue, she wore several costumes for her five-minute globe-trotting adventure, including an elaborate sequinned bikini, a diaphanous negligee, and a fiery red sarong.