Donna Wilkes
Donna Wilkes started in commercials as a child and made her feature debut in Jaws 2 in 1978, as one of the teenagers, which is the credit that has followed her around ever since. Almost Summer came the same year.
What she actually built was a short, sharp run as a horror and exploitation lead at the turn of the 1980s: Schizoid in 1980, Blood Song in 1982, and then Angel in 1984, which is the one that matters. The billing tells you the entire pitch, Molly Stewart slash Angel, one person living under two names. It is a lurid film with a surprisingly sincere performance at the centre of it, and Wilkes plays the double life straight rather than winking at it, which is a large part of why it still has a following.
Television took the rest. Diane Alder in Hello, Larry in 1979 lasted about as long as the sitcom did, though the character travelled far enough to appear in a Diff'rent Strokes crossover, and she spent 1982 and 1983 on Days of Our Lives as Pamela Prentiss. Partners in Crime and Teachers Only round out a screen career that was largely finished by the mid-1980s.
Movies (2)
TV (3)
Where to start with Donna Wilkes
Angel is the reason to be on this page. It is a trashy, well-paced street thriller that takes its heroine seriously even when nothing around her does, and Wilkes gives it a centre of gravity it has no right to have. Start there, and know what you are getting into.
Jaws 2 is the other one most people have seen, and she is good in it the way the whole young cast is good, which is to say functional and convincingly terrified. Hello, Larry is a curiosity of late-1970s American network sitcoms, worth an episode for the period detail rather than the jokes. Partners in Crime and Teachers Only are for viewers working through the era systematically.