Lee Meriwether

From Miss Crown to Catwoman Suit

Lee Meriwether was never after the fleeting fame of the runway. In 1955, she won the Miss America pageant and used the prize money to train as an actress at the Actors Studio in New York. There she learned that discipline matters far more than surface beauty.

Her national television debut came through The Today Show. She worked as a presenter for a couple of years, but her real goal was pure drama. After studying with Lee Strasberg, she began landing small roles in TV dramas being produced on the East Coast.

And the opportunity arrived dressed in leather.

In 1966, she was offered the role of Catwoman in The Batman. She had to replace Julie Newmar, whose back problems kept the original actress from filming the action scenes. That black lurex suit caused her minor burns due to the heat of the studio lights.

Production on 1966 was a constant physical challenge. Meriwether had to shoot scenes in a submarine and deal with sticky masks during twelve-hour days. Still, that performance gave her a visibility the beauty pageant could never have delivered on its own.

Eight Years Solving Crimes on the Small Screen

Science fiction welcomed her soon after. Between 1966 and 1967, she played Dr. Ann MacGregor in The Time Tunnel. Filming this Irwin Allen series was chaotic because it constantly reused archival footage from other Fox films to cut production costs.

Television was her true home base.

In 1973, she landed the project that would secure her financial and professional stability. She joined the cast of Barnaby Jones as Betty Jones, the protagonist's daughter-in-law. Over the eight seasons the series ran, she received two Golden Globe nominations and one Emmy nomination.

Working with Buddy Ebsen was not always easy. The actor had a very particular pace and demanded constant changes to the dialogue on the same day of filming. Meriwether adapted to that rhythm and ended up shaping some aspects of her own character to give it more weight in the investigation storylines.

In 1980, the series was canceled after 178 episodes had been filmed.

The Refuge of the Stage and Digital Voices

After her time on the major networks came to an end, she turned to regional theater and national tours. She appeared in productions of The Women and Hello, Dolly!, traveling across much of the United States during the 1990s. The stage gave her a level of control that Hollywood sets denied her.

But younger audiences discovered her through her voice. In 2008, she voiced Big Mama in the video game Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It was an intense recording session in which she had to perform emotionally charged monologues without any visual reference to the digital environment.

Her connection to the superhero universe never fully faded. In 2011, she lent her voice to the animated film Batman: Year One, playing Martha Wayne. She took the job because it let her close a circle with the franchise that made her famous decades earlier.

In 2017, she joined the cast of the film Breaking Legs, shot entirely on location in Illinois with a budget of less than two million dollars.