Susan Oliver

Susan Oliver, born Charlotte Gercke on February 13, 1932, in New York, New York, was an American actress, television director, aviator, and author. She died on May 10, 1990. Over the course of her career in Hollywood, Oliver accumulated well over 100 credits across stage, film, and television.

Oliver's Broadway career began in early 1957 with Small War on Murray Hill, a Robert E. Sherwood comedy in which she played an ingénue role as the daughter of an 18th-century Manhattan family. Later that same year, she replaced Mary Ure as the female lead in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. In mid-1958, she took a co-starring role in the French comedy Patate, which closed after seven performances. Despite that brief run, Patate earned Oliver a Theatre World Award in 1959 for outstanding breakout performance. It was her final appearance on Broadway.

Concurrent with her stage work, Oliver appeared in numerous television productions throughout 1957, including live drama series such as Kaiser Aluminum Hour, The United States Steel Hour, and Matinee Theater. She also appeared in the November 14, 1957, episode of Climax!, one of the few live drama series produced on the West Coast, as well as early episodes of NBC's Wagon Train, Father Knows Best, The Americans, and Johnny Staccato. In July 1957, she was cast in the title role of The Green-Eyed Blonde, a low-budget independent melodrama scripted by Dalton Trumbo under a pseudonym and released by Warner Bros. in December 1957.

Oliver's television work continued extensively into the 1960s. On April 6, 1960, she played Maggie Hamilton in "The Maggie Hamilton Story" on Wagon Train, and on November 9, 1960, she starred as the lead guest character in "The Cathy Eckhart Story" on the same series. She appeared in The Deputy, Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theatre, and CBS's Rawhide, playing Laurie Evans in the 1961 episode "Incident of His Brother's Keeper" and Judy Hall in the 1963 episode "Incident at Spider Rock." In 1962, she appeared as Jeanie in the Laramie episode "Shadows in the Dust." Her television credits from this period also include Adventures in Paradise, Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Route 66, Dr. Kildare, The Naked City, The Barbara Stanwyck Show, Burke's Law, The Fugitive, Gomer Pyle U.S.M.C., I Spy, The Virginian, The Name of the Game, Longstreet, Mannix, The Andy Griffith Show, The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters, and two episodes of Quinn Martin's The Invaders.

Among her film roles, Oliver played the ambitious wife of country music legend Hank Williams, portrayed by George Hamilton, in Your Cheatin' Heart in 1964. That same year she starred opposite Jerry Lewis in The Disorderly Orderly. Additional theatrical features included The Gene Krupa Story (1959), BUtterfield 8 (1960), The Caretakers (1963), and The Love-Ins (1967) with Richard Todd. She also appeared in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. in 1965.

Oliver played the female lead guest character Vina in "The Cage," the 1964 pilot episode of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, in which she appeared in green makeup as an Orion slave girl. Her performance was reused in the first-season two-part episode "The Menagerie" in 1966, and a still image of her with green skin became a widely recognized image among Star Trek enthusiasts. A 2014 documentary about her life was titled The Green Girl. In 1966, Oliver joined the cast of ABC's primetime serial Peyton Place as Ann Howard, and from 1975 to 1976 she was a regular cast member of Days of Our Lives. In 1976, she received an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Performance by a Supporting Actress for her portrayal of pioneer aviator Neta Snook in the NBC television film Amelia Earhart, broadcast on October 15, 1976. In 1970, she appeared as Carole Carson/Alice Barnes in The Men From Shiloh episode "Hannah," and she also appeared in the television film Carter's Army.

By the late 1970s, Oliver shifted focus toward directing. She was among the original 19 women admitted to the American Film Institute's Directing Workshop for Women, to which she also left a significant portion of funding. In 1977, she wrote and directed Cowboysan, an AFI short film presenting a Japanese actor and actress in the leads of an American Western. She went on to direct the premiere episode of M*A*S*H's eleventh season, "Hey, Look Me Over," and the season-five episode "Fat Chance" of the sequel series Trapper John, M.D.

In her final active years as a performer, Oliver appeared in the February 21, 1985, episode of Magnum, P.I., two episodes of Murder, She Wrote, the February 12, 1987, episode of Simon & Simon, and the January 10, 1988, episode of Our House. Her last onscreen appearance was in the November 6, 1988, episode of Freddy's Nightmares.

Oliver was also a accomplished aviator. On February 3, 1959, she was a passenger aboard Pan Am Flight 115 when the Boeing 707 dropped from 35,000 to 6,000 feet on a transatlantic flight from Paris to New York City, an experience that led her to avoid flying for approximately a year and to undergo hypnosis to overcome her fear. In July 1964, Los Angeles news anchor Hal Fishman introduced her to personal flying during an evening flight over Los Angeles in a Cessna 172, prompting her to begin pilot training the following day at Santa Monica Airport. In 1966, while preparing for a transatlantic solo flight, she was a passenger in a Piper J-3 Cub that flipped and crashed after the pilot struck wires; both she and the pilot escaped without injury. In 1967, piloting her own Aero Commander 200 fitted with an extra fuel tank, Oliver became the fourth woman to fly a single-engined aircraft solo across the Atlantic Ocean and the second to do so departing from New York City.