Linda Thompson
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- This article is about the American actress and songwriter. For other famous people named Linda Thompson, see Linda Thompson (disambiguation).
Linda Diane Thompson (born May 23, 1950 in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American actress and songwriter.
Linda Thompson won several beauty pageants, including the 1972 Miss Tennessee USA title. In July of that year she began a relationship with the recently separated Elvis Presley and immediately moved in with him at Graceland for roughly three and a half years. A few months after Elvis' late 1976 breakup with Linda, she signed on as a regular on the TV series Hee Haw where she was in the cornfields until 1982.
In 1981, Thompson married former Olympic Gold Medal decathlete Bruce Jenner, with whom she had two children, Brody Jenner, and Brandon Jenner. Bruce divorced Linda in 1983 and she appeared in a few motion pictures and made a number of guest appearances on different television series. In 1991 she married composer David Foster. With her new husband's help, she began writing lyrics for some of his compositions, notably the song "No Explanation" for the 1990 film, Pretty Woman. In 1992 they were nominated for a Grammy Award and an Academy Award for Best Song for their composition of the song "I Have Nothing" sung by Whitney Houston in the 1992 motion picture, The Bodyguard.
Foster helped Thompson write the lyrics to "The Power of the Dream", the official song of the 1996 Summer Olympics composed by Foster and Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds. In 2003, Thompson and her husband won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Music and Lyrics for "The Concert for World Children's Day."
She was active with her husband in humanitarian causes in the "David Foster Foundation Society." In 2005, the Fosters aired a reality television show called The Princes of Malibu based on Linda's slacker sons and how Foster had to deal with them. The show was cancelled after a few airings, with Foster separating from Thompson.
[edit] Trivia
Linda Thompson was portrayed by actress Stephanie Zimbalist in the 1981 television movie, Elvis and the Beauty Queen.
