Stefanie Powers became a Cinderella story overnight when she got the part of Jennifer Hart on Hart to Hart from 1979 to 1984.
Now that she’s 80, she looks just as beautiful as she did when she was 20.
Stefanie Powers was born in Los Angeles, California on November 2, 1942. Her full name at birth was Stefania Zofia Federkiewicz. She was the daughter of Polish parents who split up when she was only seven years old.
Powers and her mother stayed close. Her future dad, Jack Robinson, bred and raised racehorses. This had a big effect on Stefanie’s life in the future.
Her love of horses led her to become very interested in polo, and it also helped her make friends with Prince Charles of Wales.
As a child, Powers saw for himself what it was like to work in show business.
“Everyone knew someone who worked in the film industry, whether they were a director, an editor, or a writer. “The paths of people, especially those who were in front of the camera, were always crossing,” she said.
Powers was getting more and more interested in music and dancing at the time. Her mother loved dancing, and classical music was always playing at home. Powers danced around the house, and her mom took her to ballet class before long.
She began dancing when she joined the Michele Panieff Ballet Company. Jerome Robbins, a famous Broadway director and dancer, was the choreographer, and Powers danced in class with Natalie Wood and Jill St. John, who both went on to become big stars in Hollywood.
When Powers was 15, she started to have trouble with dancing. As she grew, “these things just popped out of my chest,” she said. Instead of dancing, she soon became more interested in movies and acting.
Powers tried out for the part of Velma in West Side Story, but she was too young—she was only 15—to get the job. She was still a child, so the law said she could only work a certain number of hours each day.
So, she didn’t get the part in West Side Story, but big things were coming.
Stefanie tried out for West Side Story at the American School of Dance, where a director told her mother that he was making a movie. Powers got a script and then went to the interview.
“I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. I walked into his office and started crying, saying, ‘I’m a dancer, not an actress. What do you want from me?’ He said, “That’s good enough.” Powers thinks back.
Soon, she was on her way to becoming a movie star. Powers took classes at 20th Century Fox, MGM Studios, and Columbia, and soon after, she got a deal with Columbia Pictures.
Experiment in Terror, a movie she was in with Glenn Ford in 1962, was the start of her career.
“That was when my deal with Columbia Pictures started. “I was tied down for seven years. Back then, if you signed a contract for a movie, you couldn’t do TV,” Powers says.
Still in high school, Powers got parts in films like The Interns (1962), If a Man Answers (1962), Palm Spring Weekend (1963), and McClintock (1963), which starred John Wayne.
She said, “So I did three films a year for five years, and then they sold me to MGM to do a TV show called The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.”
Soon after that, MGM Television bought her contract from Columbia. This was her big break. In 1966, she played United Network Command for Law and Enforcement agent April Dancer on the short-lived TV show The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., which was a spinoff of the famous The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
As was already said, it didn’t last long, but it was very popular and helped Powers get a big part years later. Powers went on to become a big TV star. According to IDMB, he has been in over 200 guest roles, 18 miniseries, and two more weekly shows, The Feather and Father Gang (1976).
Then 1979, Powers got a part on the TV show Hart to Hart.
Hart to Hart by Stefanie Powers
Jennifer, a freelance journalist, was played by Powers, and the CEO of Hart Industries, Jonathan Hart, was played by Robert Wagner. The show was a big hit.
The couple helped solve cases of theft, spying, and theft on their own time. Do you remember the first season’s beginning dialogue?
“This is my boss, Jonathan Hart. He made a lot of money on his own. He’s a good guy.
This is Mrs. H., who is beautiful. What a great woman. My name is Max, by the way. I care for them, which isn’t easy since murder is their sport.”
On August 25, 1979, Hart to Hart debuted on ABC. Like any other show, they didn’t know at first if it would be a hit.
In 2019, Powers told TV Insider, “You don’t want to hope too much for something to work.”
“Yes, someone came to get us. But how much do people really like those characters? Before we went out into the world, we didn’t feel that way.
“”Stef, do you remember? We did about six shows, and when I went into your dressing room, you were crying and asked, “Do you think it will be good? What’s going on?” We really enjoyed doing it but were very nervous about it,” Robert Wagner said.
Hart to Hart was the start of Powers and Wagner’s relationship that will last for the rest of their lives. He was married to Natalie Wood, the girl Powers went to dance school with, from 1972 until she died in 1981, but there were rumours that they were cheating on each other while they were making the TV show.
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On the screen, they looked like the happiest married couple in the world. Fans wondered if they weren’t actually dating in real life. That didn’t happen.
There was something special about the way they worked together, which made the show even better.
Robert told Closer in 2019: “What you saw was only for the roles we played.” “We got along so well because we worked together on the 1970 movie It Takes a Thief. We were always having fun.”
Robert and Stefanie still see each other. She said that they still send each other dirty jokes to this day.
She said, “We love each other.””Robert and I live in different parts of the world, but sometimes he comes over for dinner.”
Hart to Hart went on to win four awards, including a Golden Globe Award and a People’s Choice Award. It was also nominated for 22 other awards. The classy TV show ran for a total of 111 episodes over five seasons, finishing in 1984. MeTV says that Powers made $50,000 per show, which was a big step up from what she made on Girl from U.N.C.L.E.
In the 1980s, when her work was at its peak, some news outlets began calling her one of the most interesting women in the world.
She spoke many languages well and went all over the world. A lot of people looked up to the strong-willed and honest woman.
Powers told The Sentinel in 1985, “Some people have a big misunderstanding of me. They think I’m special in some way.”
“But I don’t stand out in any way. I’m not a very interesting guy. I am very interested in a lot of things, though. I’ve always had it. I’ve always wanted to learn about the whole world. I want to live there, be a part of it, see and learn from it, and grow.”
After the show was taken off the air, nine Hart to Hart films were shown on TV in the 1990s.
So, how does Stefanie Powers feel about her own love life?
She met actor Gary Lockwood at a party in the 1960s, when she was shooting The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. They liked each other right away, and after a weekend trip together in 1966, they decided to get married. In 1972, they would split up, which was sad.
Shortly after that, Stefanie would start dating William Holden.
She had met the star twice before. He had won an Oscar. But they quickly became friends when they saw each other for the third time, at a party at the La Costa Spa.
In her book One from the Hart, Stefanie talks about that day.
“I don’t know why Bill came, since he usually hangs out by himself, but I’m glad he did. We met up again, and by that time, he might not have remembered us, but he had seen some of my work, so he didn’t think of me as a stranger. As the drink hour was ending but our conversation wasn’t, he asked me to join him for dinner, and I said yes,” she wrote.
Stefanie Powers and Robert Wagner at a ‘Cheek to Cheek & Hart to Heart’ Benefit on the Queen Mary in Los Angeles, California, United States, on February 19, 1984.
“Since I had asked for a divorce, I was on my own, so there was no reason why I couldn’t be seen with someone, even this someone. Bill is always careful, so he picked a quiet restaurant nearby. We were definitely attracted to each other, but Bill was from the old school and kept a certain politeness.
“Bill” and Stefanie fell in love with each other after getting to know each other. When Powers started working on Hart on Hart, she was dating Hart. But in 1981, she and her friend and coworker Robert Wagner were both involved in a terrible event.
Nathalie Wood, who was Wagner’s wife, died while boating over the weekend. William Holden, on the other hand, died in his Santa Monica, California, home. Richard Wilson, who was an assistant coroner, said that Holden was “very drunk” when he died at age 63.
Powers is single and doesn’t have any kids. She told the Daily Mail that she and Prince William had planned to have children.
“Had Bill been able to, I would have had a child with him,” she said. “I just wanted to see him a bit more. But because of a wrong vasectomy, he got a very bad infection that could not be fixed.
Powers married Patrick Houitte de la Chesnais in France in April 1993 but split up in 1999. The next year, Powers started dating Tom Carroll, an auditor. That went on until August 2014, when he died.
Powers has also been in her own fights. Alveolar carcinoma, a type of lung cancer, was found after she smoked a lot. This was in 2008. She got better emotionally and physically, and now she wants to help other people do the same.
“I also wanted to be a role model for people who have survived cancer or are in the process of doing so, like me. She told Wales Online in 2012, “I wanted to show that it is possible to do everything again after beating cancer.”
Stefanie is worried about where Hollywood is going because she has had to work hard for most of her career.
She was a participant on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2011.She says, though, that reality stars today have become popular without having any special skills or accomplishments.
“When I look at the Kardashians, who are very pretty girls whose mother turned them into a multimillion-dollar business, and I think about how Kim Kardashian paid them $15 million to take pictures at her wedding, and I compare that to raising money for breast cancer or research into deadly diseases, it would take a long time to raise $15 million for research into deadly diseases,” she says.
“So, compared to that, I think the amount of money that this cult of fame makes out of nothing is almost a crime. Compared to important and useful causes and tragedies going on in the world, I find it not only pointless but also sad. It has nothing to do with anything important.”
Stefanie Powers has always cared about the rights of animals and how to protect them. Years ago, her boyfriend, William Holden, helped make Mount Kenya Game Ranch, a wildlife sanctuary where several endangered East African species were saved from extinction.
After he died, Stefanie chose to keep doing the work he had been doing. In 1982, she started The William Holden Wildlife Foundation, a group that fights for animal rights and works to protect wildlife. She also ran the Mount Kenya Game Ranch and Wildlife Conservancy after a while.
In 2019, Powers talked to Metro UK about how much she loves and respects animals. She has 23 horses, 3 alpacas, 6 llamas, a parrot, 9 rescue dogs, and “an amazing” cat as pets right now.
“When I was a kid, my best friend was a big goat. She said we were friends until he ate my grandmother’s rose garden. “We were both kicked out. Everything that got hit by a car or fell out of a tree ended up at our house. We had a variety of animals, including pets and bugs.
On the slopes of Mt. Kenya, the William Holden Wildlife Foundation also has a teaching centre. There, kids from all over the country can go to get away from the stress of the towns and learn more about nature.
Its website says that it helps more than 11,000 kids each year.
“Boom boxes are not allowed. We don’t let people bring personal phones. In 2009, Powers said, “That’s all left at the door.””This is a normal thing to happen. Students come here to learn about nature, and you can’t do that with headphones on.”
Stefanie Powers got a number of awards for her work in conservation and helping animals, which was very moving. She teaches at the Oxford Literary Festival at Oxford’s Christ Church College. She has also sat on the boards of four North American zoos.
After Hart to Hart was a hit, Stefanie Powers got a number of roles in other films. She played Jennifer Hart in the TV shows Hart and Hart in the 1990s but has since moved on to theatre.
The actress has been nominated for five Golden Globes over the course of her work, and in 1992, she got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Even though you might not believe it, Powers also put out an album in 2003 called “On the Same Page.”
She was also in the show Half Time, which is going to Broadway. It used to be called Gotta Dance. She has houses in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Kenya, but Powers says she doesn’t really have a home.
She knows French, Italian, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Spanish, and Swahili and has a pilot’s licence, just like a real traveller.
“I don’t live anywhere; I move around from house to house. She says, “At this point in my life and career, I’m looking for roles that will challenge me.” “I didn’t become an actor so I could be myself. I became an actor so I could be someone else, so that’s what I look for as much as I can.”
