After Mrs. Sundance, Lizzie and Foxworth would co-star in two other TV films: Face to Face for CBS in 1990 and With Murder in Mind for in 1992.
Face to Face was their shining moment, debuting January 24, 1990 under the prestigious Hallmark Hall of Fame banner:
Diana Firestone (Lizzie), a brilliant paleontologist, traveled to Africa with a team of assistants in search of the remains of a three-million-year-old man, a potential discovery that would rewrite the anthropological textbooks. Tobias Williams (Foxworth) was a rough and ready miner who explored the same territory for meerschaum (a special clay used for making smoking pipes). Sparks flew as they both claimed digging rights in Kenya’s high country. She considered him the epitome of a Philistine, narrow-minded, devoid of culture, and indifferent to art. He patronized her “naı¨ve” outlook on life and regarded her as better suited to an ivory-towered academic institution than the African bush. Compromise was out. Occasional attempts to be cordial took mutual turns for the worse. But despite their stubbornness and fiercely independent manner, their hostility gradually changed to reluctant respect and finally to unexpected romantic love.
Lizzie and Foxworth may have played themselves on Password, but Face to Face marked the first time since 1974’s Mrs. Sundance that they performed together on screen in character. “It’s not the usual kind of romance you see on television,” he said of Face in a press release for the film in 1990. “It’s a mature love story, with two very interesting and very independent characters whose relationship changes from mutual animosity to mutual respect.”
The movie was filmed on location in remote Kenya, on the banks of the Engare Odare River. When additional laborers were needed on the set, ten Maasai warriors were hired. Interviewed around a campfire near her tent (her home for the three weeks of filming), Lizzie talked with CBS publicity about the African location shoot. “The innocence, the beauty, the harshness,” she said. “It’s all here. This is life of another dimension.”
Certainly, it was a life that was foreign in terms of her teen years growing up in Patterson, New York, her young adult life in New York, and her later days in Beverly Hills. But she felt compelled by Face when, upon first reading the script, she said: “It was so good you couldn’t bear to turn the page because you were afraid the next page would disappoint you … I kept thinking, ‘I hope it stays this good.’” Face may have also jogged memories of her youth on the family farm—and even Bewitched.
Robert Halmi, Sr. served as the film’s executive producer. Jim Chory was the co-producer and actor Lou Antonio directed and also cast himself in a small role. Antonio had first worked with Lizzie on Bewitched for an episode called “Going Ape,” which debuted on February 27, 1969, in which he played, of all things, a monkey who was turned into a man (the show’s slight acknowledgement of the first and most popular Planet of the Apes film that had premiered approximately one year before).
Around this same time, Antonio directed episodes of ABC’s The Flying Nun and The Partridge Family (later, NBC’s McMillan & Wife and McCloud, while more recently, Dawson’s Creek, Numbers, and Boston Legal). In 1983, he even directed Lizzie’s friends, Carol Burnett and Elizabeth Taylor, in their hit TV-movie, Between Friends.
In With Murder in Mind, which premiered on May 12, 1992, Lizzie and Bob Foxworth worked together for their third and final time on screen within a scripted format. Mind was a fact-based story in which Lizzie played a real-life realtor:
Gayle Wolfer (Lizzie) was shot and nearly killed by a client (Howard Rollins, best known from the TV version of In the Heat of the Night, 1988-1994; NBC/CBS). Physically and emotionally scarred from the incident, Gayle remains determined to find her attacker, which she finally does at a county fair. But he’s a part-time auxiliary policeman who’s established his own security company. The case eventually goes to trial, but at first no one believes her because of his position in the community.
Through it all, Foxworth played Bob Sprague, Gayle’s longtime live-in boyfriend, which is exactly what he was in Lizzie’s real life. He was strong, calm, resilient, logical and practical; loving and family focused; supportive, independent with a strong sense of self even though he was living with his boss. He didn’t put up with too much. But he was honest, a straight shooter, and not afraid to speak his own mind. Once again, all qualities which Fox-worth also possessed.
In 1989, Lizzie expressed her theories on acting, addressing the more specific challenges of performing comedy as opposed to drama.
Laughing on screen is more difficult than crying for a lot of actors. It’s quite a challenge to laugh on cue in front of the camera. Both laughing and crying are hard for me. There must be something that’s easy in the middle of that. Comedy is more difficult on many levels. If you have ten people come into a room and say “I just saw a dog hit by a car in the street.” Those ten people are going to go, “Oh, my God.” You’re going to get the same reaction, presumably, from those ten people. But if someone comes into the room and tells those same ten people a joke, you may get ten different reactions. Some may think it’s funny; some may not think it’s funny. Some may think it’s moderately funny. So you’re not hitting the same emotional chord with everyone (compared) with something that might be a very sad kind of event.
Lizzie’s friend and fellow-actor Ronny Cox co-starred with her in With Murder in Mind, and nearly twenty years before in A Case of Rape. He has an upbeat theory on acting that he believes they shared:
The fun is in the work. The fun of acting is reacting … playing off of someone else. I’m not a proponent of rehearsing lines with certain voice inflections or physical gestures. That’s distracting. The line can be, “I love you” and I can make it mean “I hate you,” depending on how I say it. Therefore, it’s presumptuous to decide ahead of time how you’re going to say a line … until you know how (the other actor) is going to say their line. That becomes the be-all and end-all of acting. I have little patience for actors who over-strategize how they’re going to say a line and how they’re going to move while saying it. That’s not acting. That’s robotics. I hate to see “acting” and that’s what always happens when you see that kind of work. It’s technically very proficient, but lacking in the conveyance of truth. I’m one of the few actors who will vociferously defend American actors over British actors in that respect. Brilliant actors are brilliant actors no matter whether they’re British or American. But run-of-the-mill British actors are more technically proficient. They work out how they’re going to say the lines. Technically they’re way ahead of [American actors] but they don’t “invest” in a scene as much as less technically proficient American actors. For my money, if you take the very best of the American actors and the very best of the British actors, the British actors will have far superior technique and American actors will have a far superior grasp of the character! I also don’t have much patience with actors who improvise their lines. Acting is like a great piece of jazz. The key to it is listening. You listen to what’s being said and allow that to manifest how you’re going to reply to what’s being said. And I think that’s the thing that Lizzie and I were able to do quite well.
It’s Cox’s brand of passion and love for his craft that contributed to his solid bond with Lizzie while they filmed A Case of Rape. In fact, they became so close Cox says “some people on the crew thought we might be lovers.” But such was not the case. His wife Mary died in 2006, and they met as children:
Just so everyone knows. I’m a widower now; but I was the most married man you’ve ever seen in your life. I never had another date. She was, is, and will always be the love of my life! But having said that, Lizzie and I were very close; I was hanging out in her dressing room all the time … and I mean all the time. It paid off for us, I think, in the acting (department), because there was this familiarity where we could be at ease. And that ease translated into playing scenes with each other.
In 1979, five years after Lizzie starred with Ronny Cox in A Case of Rape, her friend Carol Burnett appeared in the ABC
-TV movie, Friendly Fire. This acclaimed film was based on the real-life story of Peg Mullen—from rural Iowa who worked against government obstacles to uncover the truth about the death of her son Michael, a soldier killed by American “friendly fire” in 1970 during the Vietnam War.
All of sudden, it seemed, critics heralded Burnett’s acting, as if she had never excelled in any worthy capacity for eleven years on The Carol Burnett Show (CBS, 1967–1978), on The Garry Moore Show (CBS, 1958–1966) before that, or in any of her countless prior stage, TV, or film appearances (including Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? with Lizzie in 1963). This time, because she was performing drama as opposed to her trademark comedy, her talents were praised as if she were royalty. Her crowning as a Queen of Comedy was apparently not enough for the critics.
Lizzie received a similar response when she left Bewitched behind and ventured into Rape and other extremely shocking roles in ground-breaking TV-movies like The Legend of Lizzie Borden (ABC, 1975), and The Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story (1993), among others. Only rarely would she return to the comedic tones and timing that she honed on Bewitched, as she did with When the Circus Came to Town (CBS, 1981) and in Face to Face (CBS, 1990), the latter in which she starred with Robert Foxworth.
In fact, according to her friend Sally Kemp, it was Foxworth who urged Lizzie to delve deeper into these “meatier” roles. She discussed such performances for an interview in 1980 with writer Lewis George of The Globe, while promoting her part as yet another female bandit of the Old West in the CBS TV-movie Belle Star, which she was initially apprehensive about doing:
I would rather be known as a serious … and good … actress now. I’ve always enjoyed playing real lady creatures like The Legend of Lizzie Borden, who was supposed to have axed her family. I also portrayed a lady who was raped in A Case of Rape, and a lady beaten up by toughs in my most recent film Act of Violence. What concerned me was that the script was stark with dramatic violence. It was such an unusual script. I was afraid executive producer Joe Barbara might have to alter it because of ears of network censorship. My fears were needless. Joe Barbara is just as much opposed to network and creative censorship as I am and agreed completely on the script. An actress can’t be anything less than honest when she’s working. And I am aware the Belle Starr story may be not for the entire family. But this woman had to survive by her own code of ethics in a very difficult environment. She’s a fascinating person and very real. She made many drastic mistakes in her life, including murder. There’s a certain ugliness about her, but there’s also an inner beauty and strength.
In an interview with The Minneapolis Star Tribune, on March 30, 1980, she added:
The real Belle Starr is so clouded by legend and fiction that you can come up with several versions of her life, depending on which history of the old west you study. One thing we do know for sure is that she was an exceptional and amazing woman, if not a good one, and an important figure in the history of the West.
Of all the legends of the west, Starr’s was one of the most romanticized by the dime novelists of the day. To them, she was a daring and noble woman who fulfilled the role of a female Robin Hood. Her real name was Myra Belle Shirley; she was born in 1848 in a log cabin near Carthage, Missouri. Her family moved to Texas and Belle had not yet grown out of her teens when she began hobnobbing with Jesse James and his gang, and bore one of its members, Cole Younger, a daughter. She then married a horse thief named Jim Reed and bore him a son. After Reed was killed, Starr took up with another gang and moved into Indian Territory (now Oklahoma), where she met and married a handsome Cherokee bandit named Sam Starr. From their hideout on the Canadian River, Belle acted as organizer, planner, and fence for cattle rustlers, horse thieves, and traffickers in illegal whiskey to the Indians. When the law captured her friends, she spent her money generously to buy their freedom. When bribery failed, she would employ her powers of seduction.
After Sam Starr was killed in a shootout, Belle continued her amorous pursuits. To the sorrow of romantic readers from coast to coast, she was shot in ambush in 1889. Her daughter had a monument erected on her grave with a bell, a star, and a horse inscribed on it.
In an early scene in the Belle Star film, the lead character is seen encouraging her young daughter to practice the piano. Lizzie explained in The Minneapolis Star Tribune:
She apparently loved music of all types, and had learned to play the piano at the age of eight. She actually was quite a genteel young lady until the Civil War caused her to strap on a gun and change her life, with a little help from her outlaw lover, Cole Younger. But she never gave up her love of music. She displayed her talent at every opportunity, even at church for weddings and funerals. After the war Belle played the piano in Dallas gambling halls and mastered the guitar. Even after she had become a much-hunted woman, she managed to have a piano in her hideout.
As it was during the Bewitched years, Lizzie worked hard on Belle Starr, and she maintained a strong sense of priorities and family life for her children. By now, her sons Bill and Robert were in their mid-teens, while daughter Rebecca was only ten years old. She was five years divorced from Bill Asher, and Lizzie and the kids now shared their country-style Beverly Hills home in Laurel Canyon with a beagle named “Who,” a cat named “Feather,” and Bob Foxworth, who was then starring in The Black Marble feature film.
At the time, she and Foxworth were not married. But a decade or so later, and after a twenty-year courtship, that status changed. On January 28, 1993, the two wed at the home of Lizzie’s manager Barry Krost, and they remained devoted to each other until the end.
Eighteen
Awakenings
“I’ve just reached another plateau in the type of work I want to do. It’s like a man working all of his life as a gardener and suddenly waking up to the fact that he wants to be a landscape architect.”
—Elizabeth Montgomery, as quoted by Ronald L. Smith in his book, Sweethearts of ’60s TV (SPI Books, 1993)
In 2005, Sony Pictures released the Bewitched feature film, starring Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell, produced by Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher, and directed by Nora Ephron, who also served as co-writer with her sister Delia. Penny Marshall (better known in classic TV sectors as the co-star of Laverne & Shirley) co-produced the movie for which she had originally hired good friend Ted Bessell (Don Hollinger from TV’s That Girl) to direct. When Bessell unexpectedly died of an aneurysm in 1996, Marshall was overcome with grief and the production shut down. By 2003, she had moved on to other projects, but remained in force with the talented Wick/Fisher/Ephron team, which ultimately brought Bewitched to the big-screen.
Back in 1990, some fifteen years before she dabbled with the possibility of bringing Samantha and Darrin to theatres, Marshall directed a motion picture called Awakenings.
Based on the best-selling book by Oliver Sacks, and starring Robert De Niro, Robin Williams, and Julie Kavner, this film was about a new physician (Williams) who seeks to help a group of patients (including De Niro and Kavner) who have been comatose for decades, without any sign of a recovery. When he discovers a potential cure, he gains permission to experiment with a new chemical drug that may help his cause. The inspirational film then goes on to showcase the new perspectives that are awakened by each member of this extraordinary group of doctors and patients.
In 1985, Lizzie played a character named Abigail Foster in the similarly-themed TV-movie Between the Darkness and the Dawn.
Abigail Foster—a young woman who awakens from a 20-year coma only to discover a world that has moved on without her, especially the world she had so lovingly created with her high school boyfriend (David Goodwin) who’s now married to her younger sister (Karen Grassle of Little House on the Prairie fame). In this new reality, Abigail must foster the pieces of her broken life, while coping with a devoted mother (Dorothy McGuire), who knows no other identity than to be her daughter’s caregiver before and after she awakens.
In 1978, Lizzie appeared in the
acclaimed three-part, seven-hour NBC mini-series, The Awakening Land, adapted from Conrad Richter’s trilogy of a pioneer family in the Ohio Valley. It aired February 19, 20, and 21, and co-starred the esteemed Hal Holbrook as Portius (Holbrook, meanwhile had already chiseled new ground a few years before with the controversial 1972 TV-movie, That Certain Summer, in which his and Martin Sheen’s characters introduced gay love to the American television mainstream).
Like Mrs. Sundance (1974) and Belle Starr (1980), The Awakening Land was also classified as a western, but far removed from the brightly-brushed Technicolor movie westerns of old. Whereas Lizzie’s Etta Place from Sun-dance and Belle from Starr featured slightly more shady traits, her Awakening role of Sayward Luckett Wheeler was more clearly defined as a pioneer woman.
In 1978, Lizzie wasn’t sure if Sayward sincerely loved Holbrook’s Portius. According to Montgomery archivist Tom McCartney, Lizzie believed that Sayward needed Portius, because he was educated, and a provider for her children. In Sayward’s day, such a bond was “typical,” Lizzie said. It was considered more respectable to first be married, then have children.
Meanwhile, atypical filming for this movie began in September of 1977, and it was grueling. Lizzie, the cast and crew spent the two and a half months on location in the reconstructed post-colonial Village of New Salem, Illinois. Producers were convinced the movie should be made there once the State of Illinois film office persuaded them to peruse the village, and once the Springfield city fathers agreed to fill up a nearby lake so it would resemble the Ohio River.
A vacant Springfield gymnasium was then utilized to house an indoor log cabin for inside shots, as well as extensive prop and wardrobe departments. Other parts of the state got into the act when American Indians from Chicago’s uptown were transported to the location to play their forefathers, while hounds, cougars, wolves, and one skunk from the Plainsman Zoo in Elgin were shipped to the location to help legitimize the setting.
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