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| Guest Director: Anne Lockhart |
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| On Battlestar Galactica, she played the daughter of legendary Commander Cain; in real life, she's the daughter of archetypal science fiction mom Maureen Robinson. Anne Lockhart became a legend among genre audiences as Sheba - the first female pilot who flew regular combat missions - but the child of Lost In Space' June Lockhart says she grew up with acting and science fiction in her blood. Though Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura beat her to the title, Sheba was the first female character on weekly series science fiction television to fly into combat every week. "The gender barrier was completely broken, and there was no big deal about it," notes the actress, who didn't realize that it was a ground-breaking role until fans at conventions pointed it out to her. A latecomer to the cast, Lockhart turned down an offer for the series pilot, but was delighted to take on the new character when producer Glen Larson sent her the script for "The Living Legend." The mother of an 8-year-old daughter who has done voice work and an 11-year-old son who is interested in set design, Lockhart laughs that she hasn't had an easy time making Battlestar Galactica fans out of her kids. "I have the episodes on videotape - I have all of them on Betamax, the dinosaur machine the size of a small refrigerator, I taped them all religiously when they were on - I remember showing them to my kids, "Look, it's Mom, flying a Viper!" and it meant nothing to them!" In the past year, however, her children have accompanied Lockhart to conventions, "and they've seen there are all these other people who think it's cool that Mom flew a Viper, so now they think maybe it is cool." Lockhart started her career at age four in a short subject film that was nominated for an Academy Award, and has since acquired a very impressive genre resume. Her most recent film is a family Christmas movie called A Dog's Tale which wrapped last month, but a year ago she shot a science fiction comedy called Bug Busters. "It's kind of a spoof on those movies that used to be on TV on Saturday afternoons with titles like Attack of the Crab Monsters," she says. The film co-stars Randy Quaid and Star Trek alumni George Takei and James Doohan. Speaking of bugs, Lockhart did voice work on Starship Troopers...along with well over a hundred films over the past two decades. "I've been doing voice work for years, but I never thought anyone cared about it; mostly I do it unbilled, because it's fun," she explains. "I've been police dispatchers, public address announcers, I'm hired often because I can scream - many actresses can't scream, and they need a real blood-curdler. I was a predator in Predator II. I did a movie with Matthew Broderick called Project X where they're training chimps to fly jet fighters, and all the monkeys are really four guys and me - not a monkey noise in there." An excellent mimic, the actress does accents and foreign languages as well. "I've always had a gift of having a good ear for language, as a kid languages were very easy for me. I can hear colloquialisms, and I also for some reason technically am good at matching the lip sync on screen. Some people cannot do it, even with themselves onscreen. You have to have a sense of rhythm and meter to be able to hear somebody's speech pattern. Sometimes you will have to change words, you will have to replace dialogue and make it fit to match the way their lips move. It's kind of tricky." The caretaker of many adopted pets and a part-time travel editor for a California magazine, Lockhart has done development research for television, but her main production interest is in live theater. "I've done five or six plays in the last three years," she explains, describing her latest project, a live radio theater fundraiser last Halloween. "I produced War of the Worlds as a multimedia production. We were broadcast on the radio, but we had a 400-seat theater," she describes. "I had a pre-show with a piano player and a singer in a 1938 evening gown singing period songs, and behind her I ran a video of newsreel footage. It really set the tone! We went on the air wardrobed in 1938 clothing. And I cast it all with science fiction actors, William Wyndham, Maggie Egan, me, Herb Jefferson, Dirk Benedict, Alan Hunt, Lane Davies. The actress says that "just like everybody else in town," she has a script which she and a friend are trying to produce, but much of her time is occupied with "carpool and baseball practice!" Though her daughter once told Lockhart, "'I'd like to be an actress until I'm too old to get any good roles, like you, Mom!'" her real goal is to ride in the Olympics. "I would never push them into the business - I would never have them live the life of professional kids," says Lockhart, who made such films with her own mother as Gidget's Summer Reunion, Tell Me That You Love Me, amd Troll. Biography adapted from www.anotheruniverse.com |
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