In a TV show from the 1970s, she was Wonder Woman. Lynda Carter is now 71 years old.
By Ross Tyson on March 8, 2023
Since she was the first actress to wear the lasso and bracers on TV in the 1970s, Lynda Carter will always be remembered as Wonder Woman. Giving Diana Prince the boost of femininity and strength that America needed at the time to get on board with a superhero show led by a woman.
When Lynda Jean Carter was born on July 24, 1951, acting was the last thing on her mind. Instead, the future Amazonian would try to make a living by singing. She would start early by doing shows in pizza places and clubs near her home in Phoenix, Arizona.
Finding Your Place
Lynda Carter left Arizona State University early to try to make a living as a singer, but after two years, she realised that wasn’t what she wanted to do. Instead, she went back to her hometown in 1972, where she won local beauty contests. That same year, she made it to the Miss World Pageant, where she placed 15th while representing the U.S.
That win made Lynda Carter famous, and she soon moved to New York to become an actress. She went to different acting schools in the city and played one-off roles on TV and in movies that are better left forgotten.
Even with small parts in shows, she was barely getting by. She was about to give up when she got the call to play Wonder Woman. Since she was a child, Lynda Carter had been a big fan of comic books, and now her dream had come true.
Wonder Woman
The show was a hit and made Lynda Carter a star, giving her a role she would play for three seasons until the show ended in 1979. Carter’s first husband was Ron Samuels, who was her talent agent. They got married in 1977.
Carter stayed with TV throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Some of his TV movies with up-and-coming actors like Jim Carrey and Ben Affleck were well received. While her marriage to Samuels ended in 1982, Lynda Carter said it was partly because of her drinking.
Not long after her divorce, she fell in love again with Robert Altman, who would later become an executive at Bethesda. They got married in 1984. Lynda Carter gives Altman credit for her sobriety, saying that he was the one who talked her into going to rehab for herself and their two kids, Jessica and James.
In the 1990s, she became popular again because she had even more TV roles. This was because she kept doing made-for-TV movies and her own musical specials, which she had been doing since the 1980s. At the same time, her love of music would come back, and she would start singing again in small venues and clubs.
Impact and a Comeback
By the year 2000, Lynda Carter had a lot to gain from people’s fond memories of Wonder Woman. In Broken Lizard’s second-best movie, Super Troopers, she would play Governor Jessman, a part that was written just for her. She would play the same character almost 20 years later in the sequel.
Not that she didn’t have a few misses here and there, but her made-for-TV movies were a lot worse than her other movies. She also tried her hand at voice acting and became a regular part of the Elder Scrolls series.
Nostalgia Roles
The movie Sky High, which came out in 2005, was a great way to honour her. The story about a high school with superpowers would stand out because of how charismatic Kurt Russell was and how evil Mary Elizabeth Winstead was in one of her first roles. Lynda Carter would play Sky High’s principal, a former hero who is a lot like Wonder Woman.
The movie would do well, and Lynda Carter would get more cameo parts in movies like Dukes of Hazard, which was directed by Jay Chandrasekhar of Broken Lizard. She also had small parts on Law and Order and Smallville, which made references to her time as Wonder Woman.
After she found a dead body in the Potomac River in 2008, Carter stopped acting for the most part. This is understandable, given that she found the body. That might be a little scary. She would do voice work for more Bethesda games, though, and probably makes a lot of money every time Skyrim comes out.
What is Lynda Carter doing now?
She has mostly kept doing the same thing throughout the 2010s and into the present, with the exception of a few guest roles like Wonder Woman 1984 and a return in Super Troopers 2. She was supposed to play Asteria again in Wonder Woman 3, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.
At the same time, she got back into singing and went on tour for a number of dates and shows over the course of the decade. She would also stay for a while at a few cabaret clubs in Las Vegas.
Robert Altman, who was married to Lynda Carter, would die in 2021. She keeps going, though, promoting kindness as a way of being and showing up as a fierce advocate for LGBT+ rights and safety, proving that Wonder Woman is a gay icon.
Even though she doesn’t have any plans for the near future, she still posts regularly on Instagram and even gave Wonder Woman Valentines. With everything that’s going on in the world right now, it seems like Lynda Carter is needed more than ever as an advocate and voice for kindness, which is exactly what she’s doing with her life.
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