Brenda Dickson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Brenda Dickson (born February 3, 1949 in Long Beach, California) is an American actress.

Dickson was a beauty pageant contestant who won the title of Miss California (preliminary to Miss World) 1967. After a number of years making commercials and appearing on game shows as a panelist, she was cast as one of the first cast members of the daytime drama The Young and the Restless. She was on the show as Jill Foster Abbott when it launched in 1973 until 1980. She left the show to become a real-life housewife. However, her marriage soon ended and she returned to acting. In 1983, she reprised the role of Jill on The Young and the Restless, and her performance as the show's villainess supposedly pushed the soap opera to the top of the ratings. She played the role until 1987, when she was replaced by Jess Walton, who continues to play the role to this day.

The role of vampy, trampy Jill garnered Dickson and the show a great deal of attention. During her first run on the show, she was given the controversial storyline of the ingenue Jill falling in love with the rich husband of client Katherine Chancellor. Her involvement on the serial merited a brief cameo in the film Taxi Driver, where Robert De Niro's character accidentally knocks over and breaks his television set while he watches Dickson play Jill. During Dickson's second run on the show, she was given another controversial storyline where Jill sleeps with her stepson Jack Abbott and then is blackmailed for it.

On E! True Hollywood Story Dickson indicated that she was terminated from her role as Jill because she was ill, and that she unsuccessfully pursued litigation regarding her termination. [1]. Industry magazines attributed her termination to diva-like conflict with costars or executives. Publicly, she and Jeanne Cooper, who plays Katherine Chancellor, expressed warm feelings toward each other. In 1988, Dickson hugged and then thanked Cooper in her acceptance speech when she won the Soap Opera Digest Award Outstanding Villainess in a Daytime Serial. Cooper was recently quoted in a January 2007 issue of Soap Opera Digest as stating that she "adores Brenda". However, fellow cast member Jerry Douglas who played Dickson's on-screen spouse was quoted in Soap Opera Digest as saying of Dickson, "I really cannot stand that woman and you can print that!"

Dickson has earned a reputation for occasionally living up to her character's wild and colorful nature. Among media related to Dickson is a vanity video production titled "Welcome to my Home" taped in 1987, for which she is credited as writer, director and executive producer. It has resurfaced on several video-based websites, and has gained unintentional camp status. Dickson also changed her look over the years, from being a brunette to redhead to currently a blonde.

1 Personal life
2 Award & Nominations
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Personal life

Dickson was married twice: her first husband was a dentist named Robert Rifkin, but that marriage ended in divorce as did her second marriage to attorney Jan Weinberg. Dickson has recently been jailed in Hawaii, because of a civil contempt order stemming from divorce judgment from her second marriage. ^[1]. The judge released her after sixteen days in jail when she told him that she will vacate the Hollywood condo that was part of the marital estate, so it can be put up for sale.^[2] Because of this incident, Dickson has received a flurry of publicity, and she has conducted jail interviews that landed her on the cover of March 2, 2007 issue of Soap Opera Weekly. On March 3-5, 2007, the show Extra aired an television interview of Dickson conducted by her former co-star Michael Corbett from The Young and the Restless. He played her secretary David Kimble in the mid-1980's. The interview was conducted at her Hollywood home, the same home that is the subject of the bitter divorce dispute.