Fair, freckled and quite lovely, actress Natalie Trundy had a promising career approaching adulthood in the late 1950s until a serious car accident put a serious halt to things. As Natalie Campana, she was the elder of two daughters born to Bostonian parents. A child model took dance classes and started flirted with an acting career even before she graduated from elementary school. The little stra ...
show all Fair, freckled and quite lovely, actress Natalie Trundy had a promising career approaching adulthood in the late 1950s until a serious car accident put a serious halt to things. As Natalie Campana, she was the elder of two daughters born to Bostonian parents. A child model took dance classes and started flirted with an acting career even before she graduated from elementary school. The little strawberry blonde made her TV debut as a singing and dancing Little Red Riding Hood in a Fred Waring live broadcast. The talented youngster quickly moved into radio and commercial work and made her Broadway debut at age 13 playing Janet Blair 's daughter in "Kiss and Tell." By this time she was attending New York's Professional Children's School. She subsequently appeared alongside multiple Tony winner Shirley Booth in the Broadway musical "By the Beautiful Sea" (1953), which took place at Coney Island at the turn of the century, replacing the originally cast ingénue. She followed this with the short-lived play "Girls of Summer" (1956) which starred Shelley Winters.
At age 15 Natalie made her debut in the Italian film "The Montecarlo (1956)" which featured such foreign luminaries as Marlene Dietrich and Vittorio De Sica in the cast. Agent-turned-producer Arthur P. Jacobs, who represented Ms. Dietrich at the time and was nearly 18 years older, met young Natalie during this filming. Years later they would meet again and this time marry. Producer Kirk Douglas cast Natalie in her second film co-starring Dean Stockwell in "Careless Years (1957)", a typical troubled teen love story.
She put her career on hold in order to attend New York's Briarcliff College and was planning to return full time to acting following her education. In 1963, however, Natalie was struck by a car and suffered a serious back injury that ended all hopes for a comeback. By chance she was reintroduced to producer Jacobs a few years later and they married in London in 1968. Jacobs was producing the "Planet of the Apes" film series at the time and had just finished the original movie starring Charlton Heston. Natalie finally made her return in film, appearing in all of the sequels beginning with her role as Albina, the simian in "Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)". The makeup proved so torturous for her that she ended up appearing in human form for the rest of the sequels. For Jacobs she also played the role of Mrs. Loftus in the musical adaptation of "Huckleberry Finn (1974)". Her husband's sudden death of a heart attack at age 51 while she was on a Mississippi location signaled the end of her comeback. Natalie went on to assume production duties of his film company, APJAC productions. A brief second marriage produced a son and daughter.
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