{"id":10553,"date":"2022-11-02T15:22:24","date_gmt":"2022-11-02T15:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10553"},"modified":"2022-11-04T20:59:14","modified_gmt":"2022-11-04T20:59:14","slug":"stefanie-powers-loved-to-travel-more-than-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=10553","title":{"rendered":"Stefanie Powers loved to travel more than act"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 I spoke to Stefanie Powers, who turns 80 today, a few times on the set of her hit TV series \u2018Hart to Hart\u2019 with Robert Wagner (above) but my favourite encounter with her was an interview in which we barely spoke of showbusiness at all.<\/p>\n

It was in March 1977 over lunch on the sunny terrace of a restaurant in Detroit. We were there to talk about her new ABC-TV series \u2018The Feather and Father Gang\u2019 (below left) for a story in The Windsor Star newspaper. The show\u2019s publicist grew increasingly exasperated as I encouraged Powers to talk about her travels with Bill, her then partner, movie star William Holden (pictured below).<\/p>\n

The Oscar-winning actor was 59 at the time and he would die aged 63 in 1981. Powers would be married, divorced and have relationships with others over time but I had a clear impression of how she felt about him when we met.\u00a0Then 34, she confessed to having been a longtime fan. \u00a0He was \u00a0less interested in the film world than she was, \u00a0\u2018I love the movies and Bill always laughs at me. When I take \u201cJaws\u201d or something seriously, he goes into hysterics. He\u2019s a wonderful man. He\u2019s terrific.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The actress was more than happy to oblige me \u00a0talking about pub-crawling in London with Holden and their regular Chinese driver acting as guide and she described taking hairy rides in single-engine planes to landing strips without radar in Papua, New Guinea<\/p>\n

Powers and Holden had been busy the last little while trying to create and sustain a cottage industry in New Guinea based on its tradtional art forms.<\/p>\n

Holden developed an interest in Papua in 1974 when he, along with oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and novelist James Michener, had gone there to try to save certain animal species threatened with extinction.<\/p>\n

A show of the New Guinea art they imported had been staged at Bloomingdale\u2019s, the posh New York department store, the previous fall and a lot of pieces were sold. But the cost of doing it, Powers said, was almost prohibitive.<\/p>\n

\u2018The handling, the packaging, the brokerage fees were enormous,\u2019 she said. \u2018With the least amount of interest or impetus, we\u2019d do it again but we\u2019d have to have our own warehouse to store, clean and repair the works and send them off to particular markets. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019m prepared to invest that amount of money. I\u2019d get that much.\u2019<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>One of the things with primitive art, she noted, was that it needed someone to be able to talk about it. \u2018The value is in the fascination with where something originated,\u2019 she said. \u2018It\u2019s no good seeing something you\u2019d like for your wall and when someone asks where it\u2019s from, you can only say you don\u2019t know, you got it at Bloomingdale\u2019s.\u2019<\/p>\n

Their attempts had not, she said, been completely successful but she believed it could be done. \u2018That, I think, would give me as much fulfilment as anything in my life. If we are successful in our endeavour there, because it started out as a dream. That would give me a lot of satisfaction.\u2019<\/p>\n

We were an hour into the interview before Powers saw the expression on the poor publicist\u2019s face and said, \u2018I guess we should talk about the show.\u2019\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It turned out there was little reason to. \u2019The Feather and Father Gang\u2019 was one of the crime comedy capers popular at the time. Powers played the daughter of a con-man (Harold Gould), who became a lawyer and helped him go straight as her investigator. The show lasted fourteen episodes.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Daughter of a Polish emigant who settled for a time in Canada before going on to California where he met her mother. Stefania Federkiewicz was a cheerleader at Hollywood High School and when she began auditioning for roles changed her name to Stefanie Power.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At 19, she landed a couple of Sandra Dee pictures and a year later won roles in Blake Edwards\u2019s \u2018Experiment in Terror\u2019, with Glenn Ford and Lee Remick, and \u2018McLintock!\u2019 With John Wayne and Maureen O\u2019Hara.<\/p>\n

TV parts followed in shows such as \u2018Bat Masterson\u2019, \u2018Bonanza\u2019 and \u2018Route 66\u2019 before she was signed for the lead in \u2018The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.\u2019 (above left), which ran for twenty-nine episodes in 1966-67. She appeared with David Janssen and Joan Collins in director Buzz Kulik\u2019s excellent little thriller \u2018Warning Shot\u2019 and co-starred in \u2018The Magnificent Seven Ride!\u2019 with Lee Van Cleef and George Kennedy and in \u2018Herbie Rides Again\u2019 with Helen Hayes and Ken Berry<\/p>\n

She kept busy in the seventies with guest TV guest spots \u2013 \u2018Cannon;, \u2018The Mod Squad\u2019, \u2018Barnaby Jones\u2019, \u2018Harry O\u2019 and \u2018The Rockford Files\u2019 \u2013 before \u2018Feather and Father\u2019 came along and she was glad for the stability it offered. It was insight into what life was like then for jobbing actors.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\u2018I was doing so much television anyway and the advantages of a series are manyfold,\u2019 she said. \u2018Number one is that you always know where you\u2019re going when you got up in the morning. That is not said lightly. You feel like you have a home momentariy. You\u2019re not schlepping your baggage around the city to a different studio every week. Then, you are a sort of displace person, a magician who comes in with his bag od tricks, does his little magic act and goes away. In series TV, there\u2019s a sustaining gear you get into.\u2019<\/p>\n

Then there was the matter of money: \u2018The remuneration in TV is not what it once was for guest performers. Everyone\u2019s salary has been going up except the gues artists. We\u2019re getting paid less now than we were ten years ago. And, how many of those can you do in a year before people say everybody\u2019s seen too much of you. There\u2019s a law of diminishing return and that can be a dangerous thing when you make your living acting. It places you in a precarious position having to scramble. I don\u2019t think that\u2019s good for sustaining any normal emotional life and nor is it good for the brain. You begin to lose your perspectives and you can also lose a good performance that\u2019s wasted on a show that doesn\u2019t mean anything.\u2019<\/p>\n

The big performance in the family at the time was William Holden\u2019s in the feature film \u2018Network\u2019. I asked if she thought he would win and she smiled. \u2018I don\u2019t know. I only know we have to go.\u2019<\/p>\n

If it turned out that way, Holden was hoping to accept the award for Peter Finch. \u2018He wants to say some things, he\u2019s told me, and they need to be said. Peter\u2019s death was so untimely. There was never really a kind of final statement, something that completed the act. God, it happened so fast at such a bad time. But, of course, there\u2019s never a good time for death, is there.\u2019 Finch won and Holden\u2019s words went unsaid.<\/p>\n

Powers went on to co-star with Cliff Robertson, Jason Robards and Robert Vaughn in a well-received miniseres titled \u2018Washington Behind Closed Doors\u2019 and made the adventure film \u2018Escape to Athena\u2019 with Roger Moore, David Niven and Claudia Cardinale.\u00a0Along came \u2018Hart to Hart\u2019, which ran for five seasons followed by several TV-movies, and over a long career her credits include \u00a0miniseries including \u2018Mistral\u2019s Daughter\u2019 and \u2018Hollywood Lives\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 I spoke to Stefanie Powers, who turns 80 today, a few times on the set of her hit TV series \u2018Hart to Hart\u2019 with Robert Wagner (above) but my favourite encounter with her was an … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6,1263,2257,15],"tags":[2335,5256,5255,5257,2333,5253,5254],"class_list":["post-10553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-recalling","category-television","tag-hart-to-hart","tag-the-feather-and-father-gang","tag-the-girl-from-u-n-c-l-e","tag-papua-new-guinea","tag-robert-wagner","tag-stefanie-powers","tag-william-holden"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10553"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10575,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10553\/revisions\/10575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}