Barbara Anderson (actress)

Barbara Anderson (born November 27, 1945, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American actress who is best known for portraying police officer Eve Whitfield in the television series Ironside for which she won an Emmy Award. She is also known for her appearance as the secret agent "Mimi Davis" during the final season of the American TV series Mission: Impossible.

Life and career

Anderson was born and spent her early years in New York City, but during her teenage years, she resided in the Memphis, Tennessee, area, where her parents had moved.

While she was a resident of Memphis, Anderson competed in and won the title of Miss Memphis in 1963.^[1]

She decided to move to Los Angeles to find work as an actress. She was successful at this, and in 1966, one of her first TV appearances came in an early, first-season episode of Star Trek, "The Conscience of the King". Anderson also starred in the pilot for the TV series Mannix, which was filmed in 1966.

In 1967, Anderson became one of the four original cast members of the TV series Ironside, and the lead actress in this series (for the first 105 episodes). Anderson played the role of one of three police Officers chosen to assist the wheelchair-using former Chief of Detectives for San Francisco, Robert Ironside, who was played by Raymond Burr. Anderson continued in her role as Officer Whitfield for four seasons. In 1968, Anderson won the television Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actress in Drama Series for her work on the show.

In 1971, Anderson left Ironside, and full-time TV series acting, because she wanted to devote time to her new marriage to the actor Don Burnett, who was born in California November 4, 1930. He is the son of a British father, naturalized American --Albert John Burnett (January 3, 1896 - 1977) and a Canadian born mother naturalized American Rosine Kathleen Forhan-Burnett (June 18, 1905 - April 6, 1959). He left acting and became a stockbroker. This was his second marriage; his first wife was the actress Gia Scala. He has no children with either wife.

She next acted in some guest roles in TV series including performances as the wife of a man who inherits a notoriously haunted house in the Night Gallery episode "Fright Night" and as a witness to a mob hit in the Harry O episode "Material Witness." She then accepted a recurring role (seven episodes) in the final season of Mission Impossible. Since then, she has acted in several made-for-TV movies, notably the 1973 pilot film for The Six Million Dollar Man, and in guest roles in some regular TV series. However, Anderson's last acting appearance on TV or in films was in 1993, in the TV movie Return of Ironside, where she reprised her role as Eve Whitfield, now the mother of a daughter.

Selected filmography

• Star Trek: "The Conscience of the King" (1966)
• Ironside series 105 episodes (1967)
• Visions (1972)
• Don't Be Afraid of the Dark (1973)
• The Six Million Dollar Man pilot film (1973)
• Strange Honeymoon (1974)
• You Lie So Deep My Love (1975)
• Doctors' Private Lives (1979)

Bibliography

• Halliwell, Leslie (1965). The Filmgoer's Companion / with a Foreword by Alfred Hitchcock. Hill and Wang. 

References

External links

• Barbara Anderson at the Internet Movie Database
• Barbara Anderson at AllMovie