Audra Lindley

I never could get into Three’s Company. Maybe it’s that I had no problem with people living together without being married regardless of their sexuality or what they were or weren’t doing in bed with one another, so I couldn’t understand having to tell someone you were gay in order to be a simple roommate of someone of the opposite sex. I’ve even, albeit briefly, had a platonic male roommate myself. But what bothered me even more was that, in Audra Lindley’s time on the show, it was yet another example of the Married Couple Who Shouldn’t Be Married genre.

Lindley’s father, Bert, was a minor actor. She got her start as a stand-in. From there, she did stunt work. She got her start on Broadway in what I can only assume was a flop called Comes the Revelation; the only information I can find about it is that it ran two performances in 1942 and was a comedy. She did some more Broadway in the ‘40s. She’d already done a little movie acting, and in the ‘50s, she shifted to television. Wikipedia says she took time off to raise five children, but there aren’t any gaps of that length in her IMDb credits.

From the 1950s, she was one of many people working in what I think of as the TV character actor salt mines. Her debut was on the Lux Video Theatre episode “Gallant Lady” in 1951. She was in a lot of those TV playhouses. She made a short for the Anti-Defamation League against anti-Semitism. She was on 912 episodes of the show From These Roots in four years. She kept going so long that, when she died, there was a script for an episode of Cybil on her bedside table; she had been written in as a recurring character but died after only three appearances.

Still, there were theatrical release movies. Most notably, she plays Frances Parker in Desert Hearts, the near-forgotten lesbian romance, wherein she plays a ranch owner who rents rooms to women trying to get Nevada residency so they can divorce. It’s a great performance in an unjustly little-discussed movie. There are other movies we can discuss—Troop Beverly Hills, I suppose—but not many. A handful, scattered among continuing stage roles and a ton of TV.

Including, yes, playing Mrs. Roper. For seventy-five episodes, all told. That’s a lot of caftans, not to mention quite a wig. The adjective that gets used of her most often appears to be “undersexed.” Because of having a husband who never really seems to be interested in her. He’d much rather nose around in the private lives of his tenants than live his own life, I guess. It’s one of the strangest cultural tropes that I’m not sure carries on into modern times. At least, I hope it doesn’t.