Ed, Linda says, didn’t really say much. The family moved to Santa Clarita, where she still lives today, but Linda was determined to make her own career.
Their marriage was, according to Linda, emotionally cold. She felt abandoned.
“It tore me apart but I just thought, ‘Well, I can make this work somehow,’” she explained. “It took me 21 years to leave my marriage,”
Linda Gray family
At the same time, her husband Ed didn’t want her to have part-time jobs; he wanted a luxurious lifestyle at home. Linda decided that it was a chance for her to get into show business, and before long she was appearing in television commercials.
A lot of them.
Linda Gray – career
She had two uncredited brief appearances in feature films Under the Yum Yum Tree and Palm Springs Weekend in 1963.
A couple of years later, Linda Gray got a gig that today is pretty much legendary. Age 27, she was paid $25 to be Anne Bancroft’s body double in the poster for the film The Graduate (1967), starring a young Dustin Hoffman. Gray’s legs appear in the iconic image, and funnily enough, she actually ended up playing Mrs Robinson in the 2001 West End State production of The Graduate.
But not everyone loved her. In her 2015 memoir, Gray added a rejection letter which she received from Glamour Magazine in the early 1960s. But it certainly didn’t bring her down.
“It was so funny that I kept that letter,” Gray said. “I kept the letter because I realized that we all have rejections, and it was her opinion when I was 20 years old. I could have had it devastate my life. But, I didn’t. This feisty streak came out – ‘Oh, yeah? I’m gonna show you!’ With great love and a lot of humor, I kept that letter. It kicked me from behind, and made me want to go and do something.”
Linda loved being a mother, but at the same time was frustrated at not being able to pursue her career. When she finally decided to take acting classes, her husband wasn’t happy.
Linda Gray – Dallas
“He said, ‘Why don’t you become an actress when the children are in college’,” she recalled.
At age 37, however, Linda Gray went her own way and took acting classes alongside many younger prospects. Actor Dennis Weaver saw Gray’s talent, and helped her get her first real acting job, starring as a guest star on the TV series Marcus Welby M.D in 1974.
It wouldn’t take long before everything then changed for the better.
In 1978, Gray got the role as Sue Ellen Ewing on the new television soap opera Dallas. At first, she was supposed to be a recurring guest role for the five-episode first series, but she soon became a regular cast member. Actually, her performances made her a star.
Dallas was all about corruption, betrayal, lies, affairs and scandals played out on the Southfork Ranch in the series. Gray’s performance was praised by television critics, and alongside acting colleagues Larry Hagman and Patrick Duffy, the series propelled her to huge success.
Gray became somewhat of a sex symbol on Dallas, and the chemistry between her and Larry Hagman was real.
Relation with Larry Hagman
Executives at CBS saw everything happening in front of their eyes, and it was pure magic. However, Gray states that the reality wasn’t build around any sexual chemistry.
“He was the bad big brother that I never had,” Gray said. “He was always doing something in my mind wrong – he was drinking too much, or whatever, and I would reprimand him, he loved that, he loved to do something just to make me crazy. I’d say ‘Don’t eat that. You don’t need that much sugar, and stop drinking.’”
“I was a pain in the neck – and he loved it,” she continued. “He would do things purposely to get me fired up. The directors were just in awe. They thought we were crazy teenagers, but when they said action, we would become J.R. and Sue Ellen. It was seamless. We don’t know what happened. It was absolute magic. We felt blessed, and we were.”
Dallas wasn’t only praised by television critics and executives in the business; the audience absolutely loved it too.
The show broke several viewing records, becoming one of the hottest things on television. Still to this day, it’s one of the longest-running shows in American prime-time television history.
Dallas – television records
On November 21, 1980, viewers got their answer as to the mystery of who shot Larry Hagman’s character, JR Ewing, and boy did people want to see it.
More than an estimated 80 million people watched the episode, making it the largest audience for a single television program ever in America at the time, according to BT. It stood at No.1 until 121 million viewers watched the last-ever episode of sitcom MASH.
Gray was nominated for two Golden Globe Awards for Best Actress – Television Series Drama, as well as a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for her performance on Dallas.
During her succesful run on the show, Gray finally divorced her husband Ed Thrasher in 1983. Her son Jeff followed in his mother’s footsteps, becoming a director.