Linda Thompson (actress)
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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 who also won several beauty pageants, including the 1972 Miss Tennessee USA title.
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[edit] Links with Elvis Presley
In July 1972 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. Linda Thompson was portrayed by actress Stephanie Zimbalist, opposite Don Johnson as Elvis, in the 1981 television movie, Elvis and the Beauty Queen.
[edit] TV career
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 1992.
[edit] Marriages
In 1981, Thompson married former Olympic Gold Medal decathlete Bruce Jenner, with whom she had two children, Brody Jenner, and Brandon Jenner. They divorced in 1983 and Linda appeared in a few motion pictures and made a number of guest appearances on different television series.
In 1991, she married composer and record producer David Foster.
[edit] Songwriting career
She began writing lyrics for some of David Foster's 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.
Thompson co-wrote the lyrics to "The Power of the Dream", the official song of the 1996 Summer Olympics composed by Foster and Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds.
[edit] Awards
In 2003, Thompson and her husband won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Music and Lyrics for The Concert for World Children's Day.
[edit] Humanitarian work
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.
