![]() There's nothing more sad than an old dumb blonde – unless you're Betty White who's still doing very well out of it. I said 'Well strangely I've been thinking of doing the same thing myself.' I got a part in Peter Hall's production of A Streetcar Named Desire and started changing my image. When I got too old to play the dumb blonde, I went to a new agent who said he only wanted to take me on if I changed my voice. I don't know that I've always made enough to pay the bills, but I've always kept working. I went on to do about 50 commercials, and because I got well known at the same time as going to acting school, when I came out I was offered lead roles in theater instead of 'spear carriers'. It was for Bird's Eye Beefburgers and I was a dumb blonde – and I was typecast immediately. At the same time I got into Central she got me my first commercial, for Alan Parker. Then I ran after her coat tails, and she did help me. Shortly after, I left the job and went to Central to continue my studies. ![]() She said, if I ever left that job she would help me. I confided in a woman there that I wasn't really a telephonist-typist, I was an actress. When I came over I phoned around to get acting jobs, but I couldn't work without an Equity card, and you couldn't an Equity card without a job! So I'd been working as a telephonist-typist for an American commercial production company. I studied it at the University of Wisconsin in Madison for a couple of years, then I transferred to Boston University because they had a very good theater department. If it's in your blood, you can't escape it. It was like George Burns and Gracie Allen – they were hilarious. When I married my now-husband of nearly 15 years, my baby brother filmed my mother and father wishing us every happiness – they were too old to travel – and we showed it at the wedding. My father really should have been an actor, he was had an unbelievably dry sense of humor. Everyone used to call me an albino because I'm naturally platinum blonde and I have white eyebrows and eyelashes, and one way of getting through that was being funny. ![]() And I wanted to be a movie star! I got the bug very young, about seven, in class plays. Everybody was very positive after the war, and I was brought up to feel that anything was possible, and that I could be or do whatever I wanted. No, but when I grew up in the '50s, it was the heyday of America. I bet that gave him something to work on! Was there acting in the family? Yes! My father said to me, not long before he died, "If you get married again, Sandra, could you please marry an American?" To which I replied "If I get married again, I'll marry you," which he loved. You seem to make a habit of marrying Brits! He's lovely and we're still great friends. We planned to stay for one year then go back and live in America but then we very amicably split up and went our separate ways. I'm bi-continental! I came for one year and married a Brit at university. I've been a 'dual' national for eight years or so, but I've been here for about 50. Sandra is an archetypal reader of The American – a long-term expat who came to the UK for a short while and ended up staying forever. The much loved American discusses expat life, her new play The Unbuilt City at the King's Head Theatre in London, and being David Tennant's Mom in Law! Sign up to The American magazine's newsletters (below) to receive more regular news, articles and updates on America in the UK.
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