Anne Francis was born on 7 September 1930 in western New York. She died 80 years later of cancer in a retirement home in Southern California.
It’s hard not to hear the name Anne Francis and not think of Forbidden Planet. For one thing, the song “Science Fiction/Double Feature” explicitly mentions her. But it isn’t much of a role. She was the love interest for Leslie Nielsen. On the other hand, for the time, her character has an edge. And Francis is excellent in the role.
Despite some leading roles, she never really became a star. She had a fairly typical career for a character actor. This included roles in film and television. She was a very capable actor with a great screen presence. She performed on pretty much every TV show you could name from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s: My Three Sons, Gunsmoke, Columbo, Cannon, Ironside, Kung Fu, Barnaby Jones, Wonder Woman, Hawaii Five-O, Quincy, ME, Dallas, Fantasy Island, CHiPs, Simon & Simon, The Love Boat, Matlock, The Golden Girls, Murder, She Wrote, Home Improvement, The Drew Carey Show, and so many more.
Anne Francis was truly a star once. She played the title character in the short-run TV series Honey West. It wasn’t short-lived for bad reasons. John C Fredriksen, author of Honey West, gave an interview with The Rap Sheet where he said there were two reasons the show was canceled:
The first was programming. The biggest hit on Friday nights turned out to be none other than Gomer Pyle, USMC — it literally clobbered all the competition. The second was money: ABC decided that they could dress Diana Rigg up in black leather and have her beat up guys for less money than they were shelling out for Honey West.
ABC apparently replaced the show with The Avengers from the UK.
The show is fun. Francis plays Honey West, a private detective who is a sexy badass. Shows like this always make me smile because for years I’ve been hearing manosphere/incel types complain every time there’s a film with a powerful woman. They really do think this is all new. But shows like this have existed for a very long time. And the same kind of reactionaries back then said the same things.
Archive provides the entire series (including the character’s introduction in an episode of Burke’s Law). Here is the first episode of the show:
Anne Francis photo via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.
Oh God I’m so behind on everything I can’t watch this, but I am grateful to the heavens that somebody cherishes Honey West. Just some quick skipping through it makes it look very fun. And Wiki doesn’t even have a page on it. What a great find.
OK, they DO have a page on it. But it’s very thin.
I wish I had the time too. I only watched the first episode. Some guy on Bsky told me he wanted a pet ocelot because of the show. That was really cool!