The Lambs Club Virtual Conversation: Stephanie Powers

An interview by Foster Hirsch

Stephanie Powers, nee Stefania Zofya Paul, is something of a revelation. While most people were made aware of the actress during her breakout television success Hart to Hart with Robert Wagner (1979-1984), she had quite a bit of film work under her belt beforehand, and later starred in theater, including musicals such as Applause, Oliver, Annie Get Your Gun, and Sunset Boulevard.  The actress/activist is thoughtful, personable, articulate, and has an incisive memory.

“After 16 auditions and three screen tests, my first job was as a dancer in West Side Story,” Powers tells us. Because of restrictions placed on filming minors, she was replaced by a gypsy who went on to Broadway. While at the Goldwyn Studio, however, the teenager met Tom Loughlin (director of Billy Jack). He put her in her first film, Like Father, Like Son. Producer Jerry Wald supported the film and she became a contract player during the last years of the system. This meant lots of classes and auditions.

One day, on a shortcut through editing, she swung a door into the face of a man wearing the same sunglasses as those she had on. They were, she relates, the height of French Riviera fashion gifted her by a Monaco Grand Prix driver. The stranger asked where she’d gotten hers. He’d bought his while attending the race. “What do you do here?” he asked. Powers responded that she was an actress and in reply to his next question declared herself “good.” “I’m making a movie here now. Come up and see me,” said Blake Edwards (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Days of Wine and Roses, Victor/Victoria). “That’s how I got Experiment in Terror,” Powers notes. She calls it a good/bad film.

Hirsch asks whether the actress accepted every role. She had, in fact, no choice. Powers did “Love Has Many Faces” with Hugh O’Brian and Lana Turner, becoming friends with Turner and her daughter. “I held my nose and got the lines straight.” Die, Die My Darling (released in the UK as Fanatic) was notable for resurrecting Tallulah Bankhead 20 years after The Lifeboat. Having fallen down her London hotel steps, Bankhead appeared for the table read in a full length mink coat propped up by two handsome young men. She was, Powers recalls, generous with actors, always addressing them with their character names, often receiving dressing room guests while naked.

“Looking forward,” Hirsch continues, “you had the opportunity to play her in a one woman piece called Loop by Matthew Lombardo.” Powers turned it down for structural problems and Valerie Harper was cast. After Broadway, Harper and her husband put up their own money and took it on the road. Two years later, in Dubai doing Love Letters, Powers received a call from Harper. Her friend’s cancer had returned. (The two women had the same kind of cancer at the same hospital and were treated by the same doctor.) She couldn’t continue. Would Powers step into the role?  And she did.

Hirsch then takes us back to the 1966 Gordon Douglas remake of 1939’s Stagecoach with Ann-Margret, Red Buttons, Michael Connors, Van Heflin, and Bing Crosby (his last film). On  the first day of shooting, Douglas received a telegram from the original film’s director, John Ford. It said: “Why?!” Why indeed. “What could you do,” Powers quips. “You want the job.”

She worked with Lillian Gish in Warning Shot, made The Paper Man with Dean Stockwell, and acted in Herbie Rides Again (Disney) with Helen Hayes. Powers was employed pretty steadily before Hart to Hart. There was even the short-lived Girl From U.N.C.L.E which prepared her for the grueling schedule of television. The actress eventually made over 200 guest appearances.

Husband Gary Lockwood was filming 2001 A Space Odyssey in England when Powers received a conference call from Robert Wagner, John Mankiewicz, and Aaron Spelling, offering her Hart to Hart. She was rehearsing a Broadway bound production of Cyrano de Bergerac with Stacy Keach at the time. As the fates would have it, a New York newspaper strike postponed the play and Powers dug her feet into five years of the series. “I think the strength of the show depends on the timing, the chemistry,” the host observes. “He still has my button,” Powers replies referring to Wagner. “He has a wicked sense of humor. We have wonderful rapport.”

“It’s hard to play that kind of light comedy,” Hirsch says. “You make it look easy. Do you think the show would be a success now?” “I think people have forgotten how to be charming, the value of charm,” the actress replies. “There’s no market for it so there’s no model for it.”

As recently as 2019, Powers was in New York at 59E59 Theaters in One November Yankee with Harry Hamlin. (Click to read my review.) Powers calls it “an unusual little play and a very nice experience.” The same year, she co-starred in the film The Artist’s Wife with Bruce Dern and Lena Olin. Lately, she’s been in conversation with The Chichester Theater Festival about starring in a production of Mame, the play, not the musical, which would then perhaps move to The West End and Broadway.

Hirsch asks how Powers got a foothold in London theater. It began, she thinks, with the sold out Love Letters. She starred in the stage musical Matador, with a book inspired by Spanish corrida legend El Cordobes and took The King and I on tour first in the UK, then in the U.S.  “When we opened in Los Angeles, the audience was filled with friends and supporters, not many of whom had ever seen me sing. I began `Whistle a Happy Tune,’ and they burst into applause, relieved I could carry a tune.”

“Before opening the floor to questions, I want very much to ask you about The William Holden Wildlife Foundation, which you founded at his death in 1982. We know you were his companion the last ten years of his life. How did you meet?” the host asks. Invited by a costume designer, young Powers found herself at one of Dominick Dunne’s fabled, star-studded New Year’s Eve parties. In another case of bumping into the right person, Powers literally backed into the actor, who turned and said, “Oh, Bill Holden.” “As if I didn’t know,” she lights up. “I could hardly speak.”

Years later, they met in a bookstore. She was looking at a coffee table book on Africa when Holden came up behind her. “Are you interested in Africa?” he asked. She’d traveled to North Africa, but not East. “I live in East Africa,” the icon said extending his hand, “Bill Holden. Well, if you’re ever interested in coming, look me up. I’m very easy to find.” She grins.

The third meeting occurred at La Costa tennis matches. He asked her to dinner. “Things progressed – nicely,” she says with a hint of the coquette. Holden had established a game ranch for endangered species in the 1950s. When 2000 acres surrounding the camp became available, he bought them with a like-minded partner.

The enlarged facility ended up breeding 37 species, five of which are no longer visible in the wild. Powers set about founding the education center Holden had envisioned. “Without that, the rest is only a Band-Aid. We need to offer alternatives to habitat destruction and enlighten people about biodiversity. It’s a tribute to his forsightedness.” The center has 11,000 students a year and 6,000 in an outreach program, all local in Kenya. “I burp the baby and change the nappies. I’m impassioned about biological imperative and regenerative agriculture. I speak at the school when I can and raise money. I keep a home there.”

After some audience questions, Hirsch closes with acknowledgment we’ve just spent an hour with a formidable woman whose energy and enthusiasm remain unabated.

Photos Courtesy of The Lambs Club

The actual interview can be found in The Lambs Club archive.

Coming Up: Producers and Originators of Broadway HD: Bonnie Comley and Stewart Lane, March 16

Actor/Director Lee Grant, March 30

Actor George Chakiris, April 6

The William Holden Wildlife Foundation