Stefanie Powers

Stefanie Powers, born Stefania Zofya Paul on November 2, 1942, in the Hollywood neighborhood of Los Angeles, is an American actress whose career has spanned film, television, and stage. Her surname was frequently cited as Federkiewicz, the Polish family name she acknowledges in her Polish-language autobiography. At sixteen, she signed a studio contract with Columbia Pictures, at which point the industry-standard name change produced the more Anglo-Saxon "Stefanie Powers."

Her father, Morrison Bloomfield Paul (1909–1993), was a cinematographer born in Montreal to a Jewish immigrant family from Eastern Europe. Powers remained estranged from him throughout her life, and in her memoir One from the Hart she refers to the tension and unhappiness his presence created without ever mentioning him by name. Her mother, born Juliana Dimitria Golan (1912–2009) on a farm near Middletown, New York, came from Catholic parents of Polish descent and was known in later life as Julie Powers. She died in Los Angeles from pneumonia at the age of 96. Powers also had an older brother, Jeffrey Julian Paul (1940–2013), of Orangevale, California, and a half-sister, Diane Pascoe Hanson Baillie, who died in 2000. Before her professional career began, Powers was a pom pom girl and a member of the swim team at Hollywood High School.

Her screen career began in 1961 when, billed as Taffy Paul, she appeared in Tom Laughlin's independent film The Young Sinner, which was not released until 1965. Early supporting roles followed in films including Experiment in Terror (1962), If a Man Answers (1962), Tammy Tell Me True (1961), Palm Springs Weekend (1963), McLintock! (1963), The Interns (1962), and its sequel The New Interns (1964). In 1965 she appeared opposite Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling, released in the United Kingdom as Fanatic. That same year she was cast in the starring role of April Dancer in the television series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., a spin-off of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. that ran for one season of 29 episodes from September 16, 1966, to April 11, 1967. Her profile rose sufficiently during the series' debut period that she appeared on the cover of TV Guide for the December 31, 1966–January 6, 1967 issue.

In 1967 she appeared in Warning Shot with David Janssen, and her 1970s film work included The Boatniks (1970), Herbie Rides Again, and The Magnificent Seven Ride! (1972). She signed a contract with Universal Studios in 1970 and accumulated numerous guest appearances on television series of the era, among them Lancer (1969), McCloud (1971), The Mod Squad (1972), Banacek (1972), Kung Fu (1974), The Rockford Files (1975), The Six Million Dollar Man (1976), The Bionic Woman (1976), and McMillan & Wife (1977). She also guest-starred in the Robert Wagner series It Takes a Thief in 1970, nearly a decade before the two would co-star together more prominently. Prior to Hart to Hart, she starred in The Feather and Father Gang as attorney Toni "Feather" Danton, opposite Harold Gould as her ex-con father Harry Danton, a series that ran for 13 episodes.

In 1977, Powers played Sally Whalen in the six-part television miniseries Washington: Behind Closed Doors, a Paramount Television production based on John Ehrlichman's novel The Company, which drew on Ehrlichman's experiences with the Nixon administration. The cast included Cliff Robertson, Jason Robards, Robert Vaughn, Lois Nettleton, and John Houseman. The following year she starred with Paul Clemens and Brian Dennehy in the Tony Richardson-directed television film A Death in Canaan, a dramatization of a nonfiction account of Connecticut residents defending a teenager charged with his mother's murder in September 1973. Powers portrayed freelance writer Joan Barthel, whose reporting had brought attention to the case. The film was nominated for an Emmy Award as Outstanding Special of the 1977–78 season and marked Richardson's American television directing debut.

Also in 1978, Powers and Stacy Keach led a stage production of Cyrano de Bergerac at the Central Theater in the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center, directed by Rae Allen as part of an eight-month Long Beach Theater Festival. The production had been intended to transfer to Broadway following its California run, but the 1978 New York City newspaper strike of 88 days curtailed theatre advertising and reduced box-office sales sufficiently to prevent the transfer.

Powers became most widely recognized through her role as Jennifer Hart in the American mystery series Hart to Hart, opposite Robert Wagner as Jonathan Hart. The series aired for five seasons from 1979 to 1984, and Powers received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations and five Golden Globe Award nominations for the performance. She and Wagner later reunited for eight Hart to Hart television movies in the 1990s. Her other notable television work of the period includes the 1984 miniseries Mistral's Daughter, based on Judith Krantz's novel; the 1985 two-part television film Deceptions, in which she played twins; and the 1987 CBS drama At Mother's Request, in which she portrayed Frances Schreuder, a woman who manipulated her seventeen-year-old son into killing her father. The script was adapted by Richard DeLong Adams and directed by Michael Tuchner.

Her stage work extended internationally when she starred with John Barrowman in the 1991 London musical Matador at the Queen's Theatre, a production with a book inspired by Spanish bullfighting legend El Cordobés. The show was staged by Elijah Moshinsky for producer Laurence Myers, with choreography by Arlene Phillips and Rafael Aguilar and scenery by William Dudley. In 1993, Powers and Robert Wagner appeared together in a stage production of Love Letters at the Chicago Theatre, portraying Melissa Gardner and Andrew Makepeace Ladd III across a forty-year correspondence performed without either actor leaving their chair.

Powers' Broadway career spanned from 1996 to 2013. In 1996 she toured as Margo Channing in a production of Applause with hopes of a Broadway revival, though that transfer did not occur. She went on to appear on Broadway in The King and I and to star in Looped. Her film work resumed after a long gap when she appeared in The Artist's Wife in 2019, playing performance artist Ada Risi, her first theatrical film since Escape to Athena in 1979, in which she had starred alongside Roger Moore, David Niven, Telly Savalas, Claudia Cardinale, and Elliott Gould in a story about Anglo-American prisoners attempting to liberate themselves and Greek art treasures, filmed on location in the Dodecanese islands of Greece.