For modern audiences, Gal Gadot has been a revelation as Wonder Woman in the same way that Daniel Craig was when he first assumed the role of James Bond in Casino Royale; “newcomers” assuming Iconic characters from their predecessors — respectively Lynda Carter and Sean Connery — and nailing them in a way that no others had been able to.
At the same time, in the case of Diana Prince, there was a tip of the hat — or in this case tiara — to Carter, who shows up in the mid-credit scene at the end of Wonder Woman 1984. Fans were thrilled to see her, and for good reason.
From 1975 (in a World War II setting aired on ABC) to 1979 (placed in contemporary times for CBS), the statuesque actress portrayed the super heroine with humor, grace and style, entertaining viewers of all ages. Carters Wonder Woman endures today as a pop icon through reruns, disc and streaming services.
Many fans were drawn to the program because Carter — a former Miss World USA — was (and remains) stunning, dressed in her patriotic one-piece. But others tuned in simply because she made Diana Prince human and approachable. “That’s exactly what I tried to do,” says Carter. “Wonder Woman possessed super powers, but her special abilities did not solely define who she was. With Wonder Woman, people had a chance to see something that they hadn’t seen before on TV — a physically able, emotionally and psychologically stable, independent woman with a fantasy element.”
Cathy Lee Crosby Was First
In March 1974, ABC aired the first Wonder Woman pilot, written by John D.F. Black (the original Star Trek‘s first story editor) and directed by Vincent McEveety. This updated reworking of Charles Moulton’s 1940 comic didn’t score with critics, viewers or network execs. In it, Diana Prince lived in contemporary times, had blonde hair and appeared without her star-spangled wardrobe. She was athletic, but lacked super-powers, and her double life as Wonder Woman was not clearly defined. In the pilot, she left Paradise Island to combat villains with Steve Trevor (Kaz Garas) and the U.S. government, and helped bust an international spy ring run by Abner Smith (Ricardo Montalban).
The role of Diana Prince/Wonder Woman fell to Cathy Lee Crosby, who, by 1974, had decided she needed a change from her career as a professional tennis player and looked towards acting. She had scored a role in the Walter Matthau feature film The Laughing Policeman, but then got what she thought was a dream role: that of Wonder Woman in a TV movie/backdoor pilot that ultimately did not go to series.
“It was my first real job,” reflects Crosby, “so the significance of the project was that I was acting, but then, to have the opportunity to play a character that you grew up with as a little kid was so meaningful to me. At the time I was a professional tennis player and a lot of that, but as a little girl – actually a girl of any age – you couldn’t help but love a woman who looks great, who has an invisible plane and some amazing bracelets. What a great fantasy.”
She admits that she was a little surprised that she was cast in the role in the first place. “I would have thought they would have gone with a brunette,” says the blonde Crosby, “but then I realized that the original movie was actually jointly owned by Warner Bros. and ABC. From what I understand, Warner Bros. wanted to do it more James Bond and ABC wanted to do it more comic book. So I guess it went halfway down the middle, because in a lot of ways this Wonder Woman was more like a female James Bond."
“For me,” she continues, “it was an interesting opportunity and an amazing character. I think she was capable and she had all of these great tools. She kind of had fun with the whole thing; she could do whatever she needed to do and was completely what you would think of as a superhero. She tried to right wrongs, and who wouldn’t love to be able to do that? And then, when you’re in trouble, you call upon your bracelets or your lasso to pull you through. I loved that concept, and the fact that her enemies would try to stop her in every way that they could and she was able to meet the challenge. I think that’s a great image to represent.”
Enter Lynda Carter
By late 1975, Carter had replaced Crosby as The New, Original Wonder Woman in a second, successful version, along with Lyle Waggoner as the new Trevor. In this incarnation, set during World War II, U.S. Army pilot Trevor was shot down by Germans in a remote section of the Atlantic, crash-landing on Paradise Island, an uncharted isle inhabited by agile, nubile and immortal Amazons. Princess Diana nursed Trevor back to health, fell in love with him and returned to America with him (after erasing his memory of Paradise Island with a drug). Before long, as Wonder Woman, she was facing Nazi spies out to steal an advanced bomb prototype.
In 1977, The New, Original Wonder Woman left ABC for CBS and became a weekly series entitled The New Adventures of Wonder Woman. Its third pilot, written by Stephen Kandel and directed by Alan Crosland, took place 32 years after World War II, with the immortal Princess Diana having long since returned to Paradise Island. She again discovers a downed U.S. aircraft on the island, this time carrying government agents. One passenger, to Diana’s amazement, appears to be a youthful Trevor, The agent is, in fact, the original Trevor’s dead ringer of a son (also played by Waggoner), who works for the Inter-Agency Defense Command (IADC). Diana resurrects her Wonder Woman persona and teams with Trevor Jr. to combat evil, assisted by IRA (a.k.a. Internal Retrieval Associative), a talking computer who knows her true identity.
Carter entered the hero biz through Alan Shane, head of casting for Warner Bros. Shane introduced Carter to Cramer, who was responsible for her getting the part. “She was so far ahead of any other actress up for the role,” insists Cramer. Unfortunately, ABC didn’t agree, preferring someone with more experience. “There were those at ABC,” producer Douglas Cramer notes, “who felt that Lynda could not have carried a show of her own, because she had not previously appeared in a series. But the minute she stepped into that wild costume, I knew — and we all knew —that we had found our Wonder Woman.”
Ironically, Carter had tested for, and of course didn’t get-the first Wonder Woman pilot. “I didn’t even get a callback for that one,” she says. But eight or nine months later, when Cramer set out to revamp the concept, Carter’s phone rang, and an interview for the second pilot was scheduled. “I walked in,” Carter recalls of the conference, “expecting, of course, that anyone who was anyone in television would be there. And they were, the whole gang: Farrah Fawcett, Jaclyn Smith, Kate Jackson, Suzanne Somers, Lindsay Wagner, Cheryl Ladd. We all went to the same auditions, at the time. None of us had done that much, just a couple of commercials and small parts on various shows. Kate was really the only one with any extensive experience [i.e., The Rookies]. The interesting thing is that we didn’t have to do a cold reading, which I’ve never been too fond of anyway. I never won a role from doing one. I’m terrible at them. I freeze up.”
It didn’t matter. Cramer had warmed up to an early screen test of Carter’s, and told her it was unnecessary for her to audition. “So, I just went home,” the actress says, “very keyed up and excited. Here I was, this brand new actor, just starting out and studying, without anything but a couple of bit roles to my name, and Doug was ready to cast me in the lead. He really went to bat for me, and I was thrilled.”
Carter still gets lots of fan mail, including “a wonderful letter” from a woman who, in a college thesis, named Wonder Woman as the inspiration for her career. “She came from an underprivileged background,” Carter explains, “and she went out and attained what she wanted in life because of Wonder Woman. It all stemmed from when she first watched the show as a little girl, when the ideas of who she wanted to be, coupled with her determination to be that person as an adult, were just forming. I was overwhelmed.”
The actress views her experience on Wonder Woman as “a phenomenon unto itself. I enjoyed doing the series,” she says, “especially the stunts, and that twinkle-in-your-eye humor. We never made fun of anything, but we had fun with the material.”
The Wonder Women That Didn’t Happen
That “fun” is the reason that there were a number of attempts over the years to bring the character back to television prior to Gal Gadot taking on the part for the big screen in 2016’s Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. In the early 2000s, Deborah Joy Levine, creator of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, developed her own version which came pretty close to the casting process before it was dropped.
“My new take,” Levine explains, “is that she is a Greek history professor, a young and very bright woman having a hard time juggling her personal life with her work. In this case, of course, her real work is being an Amazon warrior. It’s, like, ‘I’ll save the world, come home, pop a Lean Cuisine in the oven and watch the soap I taped this afternoon.’ In many ways, she’s like a real woman, a real person. There’s a lot less holier than thou, out to fight for truth and justice, and more or less the fact that she’s here, she did come from Paradise Island, she was sent by her mother who the gods spoke to and said you have to send an emissary. So she came here and that’s sort of what she’s supposed to do as Wonder Woman, but she’s trying to live a normal life as Diana Prince, Greek history professor, as well.”
The next attempted version took place in 2011 and was written by David E. Kelly, with Adrianne Palicki in the dual role of Diana Prince and Wonder Woman. Palicki, recently featured in an interview at CBM, told us, “Wonder Woman was actually the most amazing, surreal experience. David E. Kelley fought for me on that one. He just saw that I was her and it was one of the cooler roles of my life and experiences. And I was, like, ‘Wow, I got paid to wear this costume!’ Even if it didn’t go to series, it was a great group of people. But it was a lot of pressure, I’m not going to lie. I was taking on a huge responsibility to a lot of people.”
That responsibility, and having become a part of the legacy of Wonder Woman, is something that Cathy Lee Crosby still considers. “The more that I have worked on other jobs, other films or whatever it may be,” she says, “the more you begin to see these fans come out of nowhere feeling that you are a part of this history. It’s a wonderful feeling, and not something I expected.”
It is, of course, Lynda Carter who is most closely identified with the character and she has no problem expressing her gratitude for everything that the show has allowed her to do as a performer over the decades. “Wonder Woman gave me my start,” she reflects. “She was the big hand up that helped me to realize all of my dreams, and all of the things that have happened, subsequently, with my career. I was young and somewhat naïve back then. Yet what I learned was substantial, and it was all because of Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman has always had a life of her own, for whatever reason. Why it reached into the hearts of so many people may never be fully explained.”
Additional reporting by Herbie J Pilato