Lynda Carter Speaks Out: How She Became the Original Wonder Woman 

 

 

 

She spun, the lights flashed, and for three seasons on American primetime television, Lynda Carter made 40 million people believe that a woman could walk into any room on Earth and simply be the most powerful person in it. Nobody had planned for the spin. Nobody had written it into any script.

 Lynda invented it herself, alone in rehearsal, because she felt the transformation needed to cost Diana something. Needed to signal that a woman wasn’t putting on a costume, but releasing a part of herself she’d been keeping compressed. That is the story of Lynda Carter in miniature. She was handed a frame, she looked at it, she found what was missing, and she put it there herself. Nobody asked her to.

Nobody knew to ask. She was born on July 24th, 1951 in Phoenix, Arizona. Third child of Colby Carter and Juanita, a woman whose Mexican heritage gave her a beauty that made strangers recalibrate mid-sentence. Lynda absorbed both parents, her father’s composure, her mother’s fire. She joined a band called Just Us while still in high school, then The Relatives, touring regionally while enrolled at Arizona State University.

She won the campus title of Most Talented Student, which was enough confirmation she dropped out and kept going. The Garfin Gathering came next, a performing group she stayed with until 1972, playing the Southwest and Midwest circuit. The kind of rooms where you learn fast whether you have what it actually takes.

 Most people who play those rooms don’t make it, not because they lack talent, but because the gap between where you are and where you want to be can start to look on a Tuesday night in a half-empty club less like a gap and more like a wall. Linda never bought that it was a wall. She kept moving. In 1972, at 21 years old, she decided to try something adjacent. She began modeling.

And then she entered the Miss World USA pageant, partly as a way of widening her visibility, partly because she was 21 and curious, and partly because she had inherited her mother’s specific relationship with the camera. She won, and the win changed things in ways she hadn’t anticipated because it opened doors in Los Angeles that the music had not yet found.

 She started getting noticed by television producers. She started taking acting classes. She got small roles in shows like Nakia and Starsky and Hutch, roles designed to see if the camera loved her the way the pageant photographs did. It did. But the role that would define everything came with a fight she almost lost before it began.

 The story of how Wonder Woman came to television in 1975 is a story about two separate problems colliding into one. The first problem was DC Comics, which had been trying to get its most iconic female character onto the screen in some viable form since the early 1970s. The second problem was ABC, which wanted to program something on Wednesday nights that could pull viewers away from the competition without costing what a prestige drama would cost.

 The solution, on paper, was obvious. Adapt the comic, make it a period piece set during World War II, find the right woman, and film it. In practice, the casting consumed months. The producers brought in hundreds of women. They were looking for something extremely specific and extremely difficult to manufacture. A combination of physical presence, warmth, intelligence, and an almost paradoxical quality that the costume required.

 The ability to look simultaneously invulnerable and approachable. To seem like someone who could stop a bullet and also someone you’d want to sit next to at a dinner party. Linda Carter walked into that room and had the wrong result the first time, as we have established. But she was not the kind of person who processed rejection as information about her limits.

 She processed it as information about timing and strategy and what she might need to do differently. She went back. She worked on the physicality of it, the way Diana Prince moved, the way she carried herself when she was pretending to be someone ordinary, which was the acting challenge at the heart of the role. Diana Prince was a woman hiding extraordinary power under a deliberately unremarkable surface.

 And getting that right meant understanding both halves of her, the dazzle and the restraint. By the time Linda walked into the room for the second time, she was not auditioning. She was arriving. The pilot aired in November 19 75 and the response was immediate. Not a slow build, immediate.

 The reviews noted the show’s charm and Linda’s ease on screen, but they were not quite prepared for what the audience immediately understood, that this was not just a likable show. This was, for millions of American women and girls watching on Wednesday nights, something closer to a revelation. Because there had been heroines on television before, and there had been capable women, and there had been female leads who were funny or brave or resourceful, but there had never been quite this.

 A woman who was simply the most powerful person in the room, always, without caveat, without needing to be rescued, without her power being played for comedy or treated as a curiosity. Wonder Woman walked into danger and the danger flinched. What the audience never knew was what it was costing to put that on screen 3 days a week.

 The production schedule for Wonder Woman in its first season was, by any reasonable standard, brutal. They were shooting a period drama with elaborate costuming and significant stunt requirements on a television timeline, which meant fast and faster and faster still. Lynda performed the majority of her own stunts. This was not the studio’s preference.

 Studios don’t love their lead actors performing stunts because a broken arm shuts down production, but it was Lynda’s insistence, and eventually they stopped arguing about it because arguing with her about it was taking longer than just letting her do them. She flipped cars. She ran through explosions. She climbed things that needed climbing.

 Years later she described one particular stunt, a fall from a significant height onto a crash mat that wasn’t positioned quite where it should have been, in the tone of voice that people use when they have long since made peace with a thing but have not entirely forgotten how it felt. The crew was professional and careful, and it was still, by her account, one of the more frightening afternoons of her working life.

 And then there was the spin, the transformation sequence, the moment when Diana Prince raises her arms and spins, and the flash of light gives way to Wonder Woman in full costume, has become one of the most recognized images in American television history. It has been parodied, homaged, analyzed, and recreated so many times across so many decades that it exists in the cultural vocabulary completely independently of the show that produced it.

 What almost nobody knows is that Lynda Carter invented it herself. The original scripts called for a more straightforward transformation, light and costume, no particular movement required. Lynda looked at it during early rehearsals and felt that something was wrong. The change needed to cost Diana something, or at least to signal that something was happening, that this was not a woman putting on a uniform, but a woman releasing a part of herself she had been keeping compressed.

She experimented with the spin on her own time in rehearsal without telling the director what she was planning. The first time she did it on camera, the crew went quiet. Then they played back the footage, then they kept the spin. DC Comics, recognizing almost immediately that something had been created that transcended the episode it appeared in, incorporated the transformation sequence into later comics and animated adaptations.

 The spin that has been imitated in living rooms across America for nearly 50 years was not in any script. It came from Lynda Carter working through a problem alone, the way she had always worked through problems. The first season ran on ABC in 1976 and was set during World War II, which gave the show a particular visual grammar, the khaki and the jeeps and the Allied command centers and the specific moral clarity of a war that American popular culture had always found easier to narrate than most.

 The second and third seasons relocated to the present day, which is to say 1977 and 1978, which required a significant tonal adjustment. The moral landscape of contemporary crime thrillers was murkier than wartime espionage and some of the show’s effortless confidence gave way to something slightly more effortful. Lynda navigated the transition better than the script sometimes did.

 The audience stayed because she stayed because whatever writing she was given, she was giving back something more. But there was a season happening off camera that the audience never got to watch. Lynda had married talent agent Ron Samuels during the run of the show. The marriage was troubled from a period early on and the trouble expressed itself as trouble in certain kinds of lives often does, through the bottle.

 She has said, “I was a heavy drinker without loading the sentence with either drama or apology.” The drinking was real and it got worse after the show ended. Ron Samuels and Lynda divorced in 1982, the year after Wonder Woman wrapped its final season and the exit from the marriage did not take the drinking with it. She carried that separately.

 In 1984, she married Robert Altman, an attorney who would later become a central figure in one of the more spectacular financial scandals of the late 1980s, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International collapse, which involved accusations of fraud, money laundering, and regulatory evasion on a scale that congressional hearings would spend years trying to fully document.

Robert Altman was eventually acquitted of all charges, but the years between the indictment and the acquittal were years lived inside a storm that arrived without warning and did not leave quickly. Linda has described that period as the moment she understood that the drinking had to stop, not because things had become hard, but because things had become hard in a way that required her to be fully present.

 She entered a rehabilitation program. It worked. She talked about it in 2000 in a public way that was unusual for its time. Women of a certain standing did not typically go on record about substance dependency and recovery. The calculation was simple and wrong. The disclosure costs more than the secret is worth.

 Linda Carter did the math differently. She has said that the speaking was not about bravery. She resists that framing, but about a belief that silence on these things costs more in the aggregate than honesty does. What the speaking cost in Hollywood terms was interesting to watch because the answer turned out to be less than anyone predicted.

 The career did not contract, it continued and in some ways expanded because Lynda Carter was already operating in the space between what she had been and what she was becoming. And the women who ran networks and wrote checks and cast roles were by the mid-1990s increasingly the age of the girls who had grown up watching Wonder Woman on Wednesday nights and had never entirely gotten over it. The work continued.

 The 1980s and 1990s brought films and television movies, Partners in Crime, which gave her a different kind of female lead to inhabit, Hotline, Still Watch. She sang regularly because she had never stopped being the girl who had toured with The Relatives and The Garfin Gathering. She performed at fundraisers and concerts and private events and she was consistently, by the accounts of people who heard her, something more than competent.

 She was extraordinary. The voice had not been a stepping stone to the acting. They had always been the same instrument. Smallville invited her in 2010 to play Chloe Sullivan’s mother, a former reporter whose past entangled with the show’s mythology. The audience for Smallville, teenagers and young adults who had grown up after Wonder Woman’s original run, received her with the kind of response that is difficult to manufacture and impossible to fake, recognition.

 They knew her, not from childhood memories, but from something closer to cultural transmission, the way certain images pass between generations because they carry something essential that the passing years cannot dissolve. Supergirl followed years later in 2016 and 2017, where she played the president of the United States, a casting choice that landed with the particular resonance of an audience that had always suspected the original Wonder Woman could have held any office she wanted.

And then came the moment that closed the circle in a way that nobody who had been paying attention could entirely pretend was just a coincidence. When Warner Brothers began production on Wonder Woman, the 2017 feature film starring Gal Gadot, there were conversations early on about what role, if any, Lynda Carter might play.

 The filmmakers understood what they were working with. This was not merely a comic book adaptation. This was a cultural inheritance, and the woman who had first carried it on American television was still alive and still present and still remarkably still possessed of the exact quality that had made the original work. The ease, the warmth, the absolute lack of apology. They offered her a cameo.

She said, yes. She appeared as Asteria, an ancient Amazon warrior who has lived in the modern world in secret passing unnoticed through human centuries. In the film’s internal mythology, Asteria was the warrior who had sacrificed herself to allow the other Amazons to escape, who had held off an army alone wearing the golden armor that Diana would later reclaim.

>> In the context of Lynda Carter’s relationship to the character, the casting was almost too pointed to be accidental. The original Wonder Woman playing the woman who had come before Wonder Woman, who had held the line alone long before anyone was watching, who had never sought recognition for any of it.

 She did the scene in the golden armor. It took a full day of shooting. She was 65 years old and she wore that armor the way she had worn the costume 40 years earlier, not as something imposed on her from the outside, but as something that fit, that had always fit, that she had simply been keeping on the inside for the intervals between wearing it on camera.

>> The film grossed more than $800 million worldwide. Her cameo lasted 90 seconds. The response online was disproportionate to those 90 seconds in a way that told you something about what those 90 seconds were carrying. It was not nostalgia exactly. Nostalgia is passive. This was more active than that.

 It was recognition, the specific pleasure of seeing something that had mattered restored to view, confirmed as real, given new context that made the original thing feel larger rather than diminished. >> Gal Gadot has said publicly and often that she would not have the role she has without Lynda Carter, that the template existed before she arrived and that she knew it.

 What Lynda has been doing in the years since the cameo is a version of what she has always done, recalibrated for the person she has become rather than the person she was when she first put on the costume. She performs. She advocates. She speaks at events and rallies for causes that include breast cancer research and gun control.

 The latter, a position she has held with particular conviction since the political landscape began demanding it in ways that were impossible to ignore. She has given money and time and increasingly the specific currency of her presence, which remains at 73, a more valuable thing than most people’s publicists could manufacture. Robert Altman died in February 2021 after 37 years of marriage.

 She has spoken about his death with the directness that has always been her default register, not performing grief for an audience, but acknowledging plainly that he was the great companion of her adult life and that his absence has a shape and a weight that nothing she does makes disappear. They had weathered the BCCI scandal and the recovery and the decades of a working life that was sometimes glamorous and sometimes grueling and always, in some fundamental sense, hers.

He had been her partner in all of it. She is still standing on the other side of losing him because standing on the other side of difficult things is at this point something she has had a great deal of practice doing. In 2018, a star was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with her name on it.

 The ceremony was attended by people who had known her for decades and people who had found her last year. And the thing that was visible across all of them was the same thing, the recognition that what she had made was not merely a hit television show, it was a before and after. Before Wonder Woman, there was no template for the female superhero on American primetime television.

 After Wonder Woman, the template existed and the entire industry had to deal with it. Every subsequent version of the character in animation, in film, in comic reboots, in the cultural conversation exists in a landscape that Linda Carter’s three seasons shaped. The show ended in 1979. The influence did not end.