Anne Francis

Anne Francis was an American actress born on September 16, 1930, in Ossining, New York, to Philip Ward Francis and Edith (née Albertson) Francis, their only child. She entered show business at age five, working as a child model to help support her family during the Great Depression. Her Broadway career began in childhood, with appearances in productions including Everywhere I Roam and the musical White Horse Inn between 1936 and 1938, making her debut on the Broadway stage at age eleven.

Francis transitioned to film after being placed under contract with MGM, making her first screen appearances in This Time for Keeps (1947) and Summer Holiday (1948). She accumulated supporting credits in So Young, So Bad (1950), Lydia Bailey (1952), The Rocket Man (1954), Susan Slept Here (1954), and Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), before landing her first leading role in Blackboard Jungle (1955). Her most celebrated film performance came the following year, when she played Altaira in Forbidden Planet (1956), a science-fiction production that was among the first big-budget, color films in the genre and received an Academy Award nomination for best effects. Additional film credits include the role of chorine Georgia James in Funny Girl (1968), a call girl in Girl of the Night (1960), a scheming trophy wife in Brainstorm (1965), Jerry Lewis's wife in Hook, Line & Sinker (1969), and a co-starring role opposite Burt Reynolds in Impasse (1969).

As film opportunities diminished toward the end of the 1950s, Francis shifted her focus to television. She appeared as a guest on The Untouchables and in two episodes each of The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Columbo, as well as three episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Her television work also included appearances on Route 66, The Virginian, Rawhide, Going My Way, The Reporter, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Mission: Impossible, The Fugitive, The Invaders, and Barnaby Jones, among many others. At the start of My Three Sons' final season in 1971, she played bowling-alley waitress Terri Dowling, a character who marries a Scottish nobleman and relocates to Scotland. During the 1980–81 season of Dallas, she held a recurring role as Arliss Cooper, mother of Mitch and Afton Cooper. She later played Mama Jo in the first four episodes of the 1984 series Riptide and guest-starred in the premiere episode of Murder, She Wrote that same year, credited as Anne Lloyd Francis, returning for two additional episodes during the show's run. Her final television role was in a 2004 episode of Without a Trace titled "Shadows."

The role that brought Francis her greatest television recognition was that of Honey West, a private investigator first introduced in the April 21, 1965, episode of Burke's Law before spinning off into her own series. The character ran a detective agency inherited from her father, worked alongside assistant Sam Bolt, played by John Ericson, and kept a pet ocelot named Bruce. The series ran for one season of thirty half-hour episodes before being cancelled for budgetary reasons. Francis earned both a Golden Globe Award and an Emmy Award nomination for her performance in the role.

Francis was widely recognized for a distinctive mole near her lower lip, a feature that was incorporated into the script of at least one of her films. In 2005, TV Guide ranked her number 18 on its list of the fifty sexiest stars of all time. She was married to former U.S. Army Air Forces pilot Bamlet Lawrence Price Jr. from May 1952 through April 1955, and subsequently to Beverly Hills dentist Robert D. Abeloff from 1960 through 1964. She had one daughter with Abeloff and later adopted a second daughter, one of the first such adoptions granted to an unmarried person in California. Toward the end of the 1960s, she earned her pilot's license. In 1982, she published an autobiography titled Voices from Home: An Inner Journey. A biography by Laura Wagner, Anne Francis: The Life and Career, was published by McFarland & Company in 2011. Francis was diagnosed with non-small-cell lung cancer in 2006 and died on January 2, 2011, in Santa Barbara, California, from complications of pancreatic cancer.