Supergirl forever: actress Helen Slater talks myths and fame
As a teenager, she played the title role in the 1984 movie Supergirl. Now Helen explains why she is going back to college
When I speak to actress Helen Slater over Zoom, she’s about to go off to college. The actress, 58, is researching a PhD in mythology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute in Northern California.
“A lot of my attention has moved towards that because work has become so scarce for women in their fifties,” she says, without a shred of bitterness. “I have been so lucky in being under the wire [in Hollywood] and still being able to make a living at it.”
Slater may be “under the wire” but she’s very well-known to DC Comics fans. As a teenager, she played the title role in the 1984 movie Supergirl.
As the cousin to you-know-who, the movie didn’t quite take her to the heights that Superman star Christopher Reeve experienced, but for a time she was on Hollywood’s go-to list, working in comedies with Bette Midler (Ruthless People), Michael J. Fox (The Secret of My Success) and Billy Crystal (City Slickers).
It’s the role that keeps on giving, it seems. She’s already played Superman’s mother in the popular TV incarnation Smallville and Supergirl’s foster mother, Eliza Danvers, in the television spin-off show Supergirl, which ran for six seasons until 2021. Back in 2009, she even contributed to the 50th issue of the Supergirl comic.
She remembers seeing Laura Vandervoort, who played Supergirl on Smallville. “I’m probably 25 years older than her. But just seeing her [was] that odd experience of, ‘Oh, my gosh, that must have been what it was like when I would walk on a set at 18.’.”
Read the full article at The Jewish Chronicle here.
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