Bonnie Franklin in 1976
Bonnie Gail Franklin (6 January 1944 – 1 March 2013) was an American comic actress, best known for the lead role on the CBS sitcom One Day at a Time. She was one of the hosts of Hanna-Barbera's All-Star Comedy Ice Review.
Biography[]
Bonnie Franklin, of the freckled, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, rosy-cheeked, carrot-haired variety, could light up a room with her buoyant, folksy personality, but she could be quite serious in a take-charge manner when it came to purposeful acting work. It took Norman Lear and a highly popular TV sitcom to finally make the 31-year-old performer a household star in the mid-1970s.
She was born Bonnie Gail Franklin in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of Samuel Benjamin, an investment banker, and Claire (née Hersch) Franklin, both of Jewish descent. She was thrust onto the stage at a very young age as a child tap dancer and became the protégé of consummate tapper Donald O'Connor. At age nine, she performed with O'Connor on NBC's The Colgate Comedy Hour (1950). A year later, she performed as one of the Cratchit daughters in the Shower of Stars (1954) TV version of A Christmas Carol, starring Fredric March and Basil Rathbone as "Scrooge" and "Marley", respectively. The young girl then appeared, unbilled on film, playing sweet young things in the rural comedy The Kettles in the Ozarks (1956), Alfred Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) and the Sandra Dee/Troy Donahue's box office tearjerker, A Summer Place (1959).
It was on the musical stage that Bonnie found breakthrough success. Following diligent work in Drat the Cat! (1965), Your Own Thing (1968), George M! (1969) and Dames at Sea (1969), she took her first Broadway curtain call in Applause, the well-received 1970 musical version of All About Eve (1950), starring Lauren Bacall. Bonnie played a theater "gypsy", named Bonnie, who sings and dances to the title song backed by her "band of gypsies". Bonnie won the Outer Critics and Theatre World awards and a 1970 Tony nomination for her effort here. She continued on the stage with prime roles in A Thousand Clowns (1971), the title role in Peter Pan (1973), and the revue Oh, Coward! (1975). It wasn't until Bonnie was handed the prime role of Ann Romano, a divorced mom raising two daughters (Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli) on One Day at a Time (1975), that she become a viable star. Although her contagious cheerfulness and beaming smile was part of her value on the comedy show, Franklin desired to focus on taboo TV subjects such as divorce, birth control, sexual harassment and suicide, as well as getting laughs. While the program didn't match the ground-breaking importance or success of an All in the Family (1971), the show did command consistent and respectable ratings ("Top 20" for seven of its nine years) and lasted on CBS until 1984. Bonnie received one Emmy nomination and two Golden Globe nominations during the sitcom's run, and found time to squeeze in a few other TV-movie projects as well -- A Guide for the Married Woman (1978), Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (1979), the title role in Portrait of a Rebel: The Remarkable Mrs. Sanger (1980) and Your Place... or Mine (1983). Bonnie also directed episodes of One Day at a Time, Karen's Song (1987), Charles in Charge (1984) and The Munsters Today (1987).
Franklin died of pancreatic cancer in Los Angeles.
External Links[]
- Bonnie Franklin (I) at the Internet Movie Database