Lorna Patterson

The Voice That Survived the Air Disaster

Lorna Patterson never imagined that a guitar and a children's hospital would define her public image forever. In 1980, she played flight attendant Randy in Airplane!. She was one of the few actresses in the cast who came not from pure comedy but from musical theater in California.

And the gamble paid off.

Her ability to sing with complete seriousness while pulling the life support from a sick little girl was the high point of her film career. Before boarding the Zucker brothers' plane, she had already logged many hours on regional stages. She was born in Whittier in 1956 and grew up surrounded by sheet music, since her training was purely vocal.

But the movies claimed her quickly after she was seen in small television roles in the late 1970s. Her face fit the archetype of the sweet-featured American blonde that Hollywood demanded so much at the time.

The Uniform She Inherited from Goldie Hawn

In 1981, she took on the challenge of replacing a top-tier star on the small screen. The series Private Benjamin adapted the earlier movie success of Goldie Hawn. Patterson took the lead role of Judy Benjamin for three seasons and 39 television episodes.

The critics were harsh, but she held her ground.

She gained technical confidence in front of CBS multi-camera sets and earned a nomination from the critics' association that year. It was a period of peak media exposure that ended abruptly in 1983. That same year, her personal life took a turn when she married actor Robert Williams, whom she had met during a staging of the play Sugar.

So she decided that fast-paced television was not her natural home. She began turning down sitcom scripts and returned to the stage, where she felt most at ease.

Faith Above the Spotlight

By the mid-1980s, her presence in the industry began to fade by choice. She preferred the Broadway stage and Los Angeles theaters, performing classics. She starred in The Sound of Music and proved that her voice remained her best working tool outside the recording studio.

Her conversion to Judaism marked her personal maturity.

It was neither a publicity stunt nor a passing phase. She became involved in her community's synagogue and began leading social and religious projects that drew her permanently away from the red carpet. In 1988, she appeared in the TV movie The Flying Nun, and soon after she decided acting was no longer her absolute priority.

She kept working in occasional guest roles on hit series, but her pace of filming dropped sharply by her own choice. In 1991, she appeared in an episode of Murder, She Wrote, playing Edie Lorraine. Her last official on-screen credit dates to 2014 with the short film The Forger, in which she played a character named Anne.