Barbara Eden, who is 91 years old, has been performing for an incredible 70 years and is still going strong.
The actress, singer, and producer is most known for her role in the 1965 television series “I Dream of Jeannie,” though she had been on film for eleven years before that.
Many TV generations have watched the classic 1960s sitcom I Dream of Jeannie, which tells the story of an astronaut who brings home a 2,000-year-old female genie.
Fans watched and laughed despite the ridiculous premise because of Barbara Eden, the stunning and talented actress who portrayed Jeannie.
It might be hard for fans to believe, but Barbara is 91 years old now!
She hasn’t been seen on TV in her notorious harem attire in a while, but she is still going strong and staying busy.
Barbara’s life hasn’t always been easy, though.
Barbara Eden was born in Tucson, Arizona, in the United States, in 1931. Following her parents’ divorce, she moved to San Francisco and enrolled in the Conservatory of Music to begin studying singing.
Barbara grew up in Golden Gate City, where she played in neighborhood nightclubs with local bands. But in the end, she too decided to go into acting.
“Barbara, you don’t sound like you mean a word you’re singing,” my mother remarked. “Acting is something I think you should study too,” Eden recalled.
She then decided acting was a suitable fit for her and moved to Los Angeles, where she began appearing on some of the biggest shows of the 1950s.
She made her television debut in 1955 as a semi-regular guest on The Johnny Carson Show, but her role in the cult classic fantasy sitcom “I Dream of Jeannie” is what really made her famous.
Arizonan actress Jeannie played the enticing genie that astronaut and US Air Force Captain Anthony “Tony” Nelson (played by Larry Hagman) released from her bottle.
“We simply clicked,” Our rhythms were identical. Whatever we were doing, we were getting the same truth,” Eden clarified.
“I was really in love with him. There are some actors that you have to really try to like them. then you store it in a different mental box. But I never had to do it with Larry. He was there all the time.
She played Jeannie’s mother and her mean sister in the program over her five years in the role. Jeannie became well-known because of Eden’s harem clothes, which at the time was a touch too risque for television.
In 2015, close to the show’s 50th anniversary, she told Today, “Executives at NBC got very frightened.” “They tightened their rules regarding the navel.”
Eden asserted that the myth was really spread by means of an entirely separate, far earlier interview with the Hollywood Reporter, following her friend and columnist Mike Connolly’s ridicule of her over the issue.
Mike started making fun of my belly button when he first came in, and it quickly caught on and went throughout the globe. I would tease him back and we had a nice fun with it, but I had no idea it would turn into something.
The iconic ensemble additionally contributed to Eden’s rise to fame as a TV sex symbol among a host of celebrities, including Elvis Presley and John F. Kennedy, who emailed her his phone number.
As stated in her 2011 memoir, Jeannie Out of the Bottle, the actress “binned the piece of paper, but I wish I still had it.”
Eden, who is 91 years old, has acted in more than 50 motion pictures.
In her most recent movie, My Adventures with Santa, which came out in 2019, she portrayed Mrs. Claus. Melissa Gardner made her stage debut as Melissa Gardner in the play of “Love Letters” the same year the movie was made.
“I feel so young!” Barbara continued, saying that she felt fortunate to be able to accomplish the work that she did. “I feel bad for anybody who, like my poor father, had to work in a job he didn’t enjoy every day. I take pleasure in what I do. I’m still employed.
Barbara said that she had continued to go to the gym, do spin classes, and lift weights until a few years ago. Now, a personal trainer comes to her house to help with resistance training, and they take a walk together.
The television icon declared, “I have a lot of friends.” “I’m not too bad at socializing.”
She even has a scheduled appearance in March 2022.
She remarked in jest, “If I’m around, I’ll be there; I really like it.”
In addition to writing children’s books, Barbara likes to act. Barbara, a little child, meets a “charming and wizardly Genie” who takes her on adventures that are a little bit like those in her well-known part in the novel Barbara and the Djinn, which she co-wrote.
She claims that because “now all they do is look at telephones,” she believes that her books will help kids understand the importance of reading.
Barbara brushes off the notion that “I Dream of Jeannie” would seem a little out of date to modern audiences.
This is a famous concept, come on, she said. “Twelve Hundred and One Nights”? This fantasy is really sweet and great.
And to be very honest, you know, she was in charge. She was anything but submissive.
Barbara Eden has led such an incredible life, enabled by her positive outlook and boundless enthusiasm. She is a true example of how age is simply a number.
If you also adore this iconic actress, do share.
Child star Mara Wilson, 37, left Hollywood after ‘Matilda’ as she was ‘not cute anymore’
In the early 1990s, the world fell in love with the adorable Mara Wilson, the child actor known for playing the precocious little girl in family classics like Mrs. Doubtfire and Miracle on 34th Street.
The young star, who turned 37 on July 24, seemed poised for success but as she grew older, she stopped being “cute” and disappeared from the big screen.
“Hollywood was burned out on me,” she says, adding that “if you’re not cute anymore, if you’re not beautiful, then you are worthless.
In 1993, five-year-old Mara Wilson stole the hearts of millions of fans when she starred as Robin Williams’ youngest child in Mrs. Doubtfire.
The California-born star had previously appeared in commercials when she received the invitation to star in one of the biggest-grossing comedies in Hollywood history.
“My parents were proud, but they kept me grounded. If I ever said something like, ‘I’m the greatest!’ my mother would remind me, ‘You’re just an actor. You’re just a kid,’” Wilson, now 37, said.
After her big screen debut, she won the role of Susan Walker – the same role played by Natalie Wood in 1947 – in 1994’s Miracle on 34th Street.
In an essay for the Guardian, Wilson writes of her audition, “I read my lines for the production team and told them I didn’t believe in Santa Claus.” Referencing the Oscar-winning actor who played her mom in Mrs. Doubtfire, she continues, “but I did believe in the tooth fairy and had named mine after Sally Field.”
‘Most unhappy’
Next, Wilson played the magical girl in 1996’s Matilda, starring alongside Danny DeVito and his real-life wife Rhea Perlman.
It was also the same year her mother, Suzie, lost her battle with breast cancer.
“I didn’t really know who I was…There was who I was before that, and who I was after that. She was like this omnipresent thing in my life,” Wilson says of the deep grief she experienced after losing her mother. She adds, “I found it kind of overwhelming. Most of the time, I just wanted to be a normal kid, especially after my mother died.”
The young girl was exhausted and when she was “very famous,” she says she “was the most unhappy.”
When she was 11, she begrudgingly played her last major role in the 2000 fantasy adventure film Thomas and the Magic Railroad. “The characters were too young. At 11, I had a visceral reaction to [the] script…Ugh, I thought. How cute,” she tells the Guardian.
‘Burned out’
But her exit from Hollywood wasn’t only her decision.
As a young teenager, the roles weren’t coming in for Wilson, who was going through puberty and outgrowing the “cute.”
She was “just another weird, nerdy, loud girl with bad teeth and bad hair, whose bra strap was always showing.”
“At 13, no one had called me cute or mentioned the way I looked in years, at least not in a positive way,” she says.
Wilson was forced to deal with the pressures of fame and the challenges of transitioning to adulthood in the public eye. Her changing image had a profound effect on her.
“I had this Hollywood idea that if you’re not cute anymore, if you’re not beautiful, then you are worthless. Because I directly tied that to the demise of my career. Even though I was sort of burned out on it, and Hollywood was burned out on me, it still doesn’t feel good to be rejected.”
Mara as the writer
Wilson, now a writer, authored her first book “Where Am I Now? True Stories of Girlhood and Accidental Fame,” in 2016.
The book discusses “everything from what she learned about sex on the set of Melrose Place, to discovering in adolescence that she was no longer ‘cute’ enough for Hollywood, these essays chart her journey from accidental fame to relative (but happy) obscurity.”
She also wrote “Good Girls Don’t” a memoir that examines her life as a child actor living up to expectations.
“Being cute just made me miserable,” she writes in her essay for the Guardian. “I had always thought it would be me giving up acting, not the other way around.”
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