Pink Raygun Interviews: Judith O’Dea

I met Judith O’Dea very briefly at a local theater’s all-night horror movie marathon. She may be best known for playing Barbara in the originalNight of the Living Dead, but there is far more to her than that role. Ms. O’Dea has had a prolific career on stage and turned her acting skills into another career in oral communications training. Here, Ms. O’Dea talks to Pink Raygun about her original screenplay and her career after zombies.

Pink Raygun: You own and operate O’Dea Communications. What does your company do?

Judith O’Dea: I’ve had the company for eight years now. Its specialty is oral presentation training. I help corporate employees or anyone, for that matter, organize, visualize, and deliver an effective, powerful, persuasive presentation. I also train trainers. Let’s say, for example, that you have a certain expertise that you’ve been asked to teach, but you aren’t a certified instructor. My course gives you the training essentials necessary to ensure training success. A third course focuses on how to design and develop a comprehensive training curriculum that offers real learning value.

PRG: What prompted you to launch the company?

JO: It came about in a rather circuitous way. As a single parent working in musical theatre, I decided greater security and a more stable living environment were of greatest importance for my children. Therefore, after finishing a run of The Sound of Music, I purchased a home and joined Hughes Aircraft Company in 1982. Within a year, I was teaching oral presentation training for Hughes’ Electro-Optical and Data Systems Group, even though I had never been formally trained to do that kind of thing. It wasn’t too difficult a transition though because of all my work on stage, in commercials, and on TV, radio, and film. In fact, I found out I really loved teaching and ended up making it a second career for the next 20 years. During that time, I not only worked at Hughes, but took communications classes at Cal State University, Long Beach, and performed in stage shows at night. It sure was a busy time for my family!

In 2002 I retired from Corporate America, but before doing so I thought why not form my own little communications training company that would allow me to continue doing something I’d really grown the love. That’s when O’Dea Communications was born, and she’s still chugging along today. Some years are fatter than others, but the great thing is that I have the freedom to do whatever independent film and stage work that might come my way.

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PRG: That’s a really inspiring story. I understand that you’ve spent a good deal of your career in the theater, acting on stage. What have some of your favorite productions been?

JO: I’ve sort of run the gamut really doing children’s theater, drama, and comedy. The one thing I’ve not done is Shakespeare. Maybe one day before kicking off this planet I’ll be able to play Lady Macbeth. Now, that really would be exciting!

One of my favorite roles was Essie Sebastian in The Great Sebastians. What a great character she was a mind reader on the British vaudeville circuit. On stage, she was always very British, very hoity toity, but when you really got to know her, she was just a down-right Cockney type of character. I loved playing her. Another favorite was Maria in The Sound of Music. That role seemed to fit my own personality quite well, so it wasn’t a stretch playing her. Yet another favorite was Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Those three come to mind first, but then there have been so many others like the little old 83-year old Jewish lady in A Little Something for the Ducks. That was a two-person show where my character helped keep another old geezer from committing suicide. It was just fun, fun stuff!

My latest appearance was in Scotland Road. My character was the last living survivor of the Titanic. The show’s premise is quite fascinating. It takes place in present day. A young woman is found floating on an iceberg in the North Atlantic. She professes to be a survivor of the Titanic. A man alluding to be a relative of John Jacob Aster, a victim of the Titanic disaster, wants to find out what kind of a hoax she’s playing or if, per chance, she really was on the Titanic (shades of The Twilight Zone here!). My character is brought in to question the girl. I won’t tell you what happens. Just suffice to say that the plot has some great twists and turns in it.

Going from stage to film, my most recent project, due out later this year, was shot last summer in Racine, Wisconsin. It’s called November Son, written and directed by Jason Paul Collum. It’s the second in what Jason had hoped to be a trilogy. The first film, in which I also appear, is called October Moon. It has a Fatal Attraction type of storyline where a young man, my son in the movie, falls in love with his new boss, who just happens to be a man. Both it and November Son explore the pain and devastation that result from a young man’s awakening sexual orientation and his mother’s anger and close-mindedness about it.

JO:It’s called Where I Belong and was first written back in 1979-1980 while I was working as an assistant to the very talented producer, writer, director Melvin Frank. (Mel wrote and directed A Touch of Class starring Glenda Jackson, among many other wonderful films.) The screenplay is about a divorced woman who realizes the love of her life is another woman. Writing it was tremendously cathartic for me, as I, too, was coming out at the time. If I had to describe the process, it might be like helping a long-buried splinter fester and erupt from below my surface. It felt so good to finally have it out there!Anyway, Mel had his agent William Morris submit it to Lorimar/Universal for me. It went up a few notches on the submission ladder, but, in the end, the powers-that-be didn’t feel it had enough conflict to warrant production. Now, remember when this was submitted: 1980. What I really think happened was that the timing just wasn’t right for such a story. Major studios just weren’t willing to address such a forbidden subject back then, and, therefore, Where I Belong wasn’t picked up.

Before I die, I would like to see an updated version of this story made. Not to see my writing on the screen necessarily, but because the timing is right for such films, and because the demand for more quality lesbian stories is growing evermore rapidly especially since the airing of Showtime’s The L Word .

For more on Ms. O’Dea, visit her website.

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