My sister is addicted to looking at the celebrity birthday listings. The other day it was Pia Zadora’s bday, and they mentioned that as a kid she played Anne Frank in a revival of the play. In one scene Nazis come to the house, and people in the audience started to yell “She’s in the attic! She’s in the attic!”
Maybe apocryphal but still funny.
I only know two thing she’s done: “When The Rain Begins To Fall”, her duet with Jermaine Jackson, and her cameo in “The Naked Gun 33 1/3”. I bet the latter was the best thing she’s ever done.
No “maybe” about it.
Whatever one might think of Pia Zadora’s acting abilities (save for a few bit parts, her film career ended with 1984’s Voyage of the Rock Aliens ), this tale doesn’t ring true about her: she never had a starring role in a stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank – on Broadway, off-Broadway, or anywhere else. Moreover, every telling of this anecdote we’ve encountered is either related in a vague, indefinite way (i.e., it involved some unnamed actress and took place sometime in the indefinite past) or was clearly a case of someone’s repeating a good story he heard as if it were an event he actually witnessed.
Zadora was a punchline in the 1980s. An actress and singer of apparently-limited talent, her entertainment career was largely financed by her then-husband (who was 30 years her senior). He was believed to have effectively bought her 1982 Golden Globe Award (for “Best New Actress”), for the movie Butterfly: he plastered Hollywood with billboards of her, arranged for her to appear nude in Playboy, and wined and dined the voters. (For that film, she also “won” two Razzie Awards.)
Yeah, I knew that she was a laughing stock, that’s made her appearance in the Naked Gun movie so hilarious. First you think, “Wait! Fucking Pia Zadora with a show number at the Acacdemy Awards? How absurd”. And then all that funny slapstick happens and you think “she sure can laugh about herself and her reputation”. And she delivered the scene well.
I watched the much-shitted-upon Butterfly on VHS in the 1990’s because a friend was fascinated to see how bad it really was. Pretty bad, as it turns out. It’s pretty trashy, but not sufficiently fun trashy. I’ll say I’ve actually seen a very few worse actors than Pia Zadora - I think a bit of the blowback came from her getting the role through the pure nepotism of being married to a rich guy 30 years her senior. But I’ve seen many, many, many better ones - she wasn’t good.
Fascinating that she won both a Golden Globe for best newcomer (over Kathleen Turner!) and Golden Raspberries for worst actor/worse newcomer. Quote:
Her acting in the film was lampooned by comedians and critics alike, winning her the Razzie Award for Worst Actress, but she somehow won the Golden Globe Award as New Star of the Year after a well publicized press junket paid for by Riklis, also hosted at his own Riviera Hotel. 
Hey, this thread is for Trolls, not 80s would-be actresses. How about you move it out.
She’s Girmar the girl Martian and, AFAIK, contributed to the main theme.
What about if Pia Zadora starts posting here?
It took me a while to realize that it’s basically the “Me Ol’ Bam Boo” number from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but with Dick Van Dyke’s character as a hapless fool. (And the part where Frank tries and fails to slide under the dancers’ legs is the same move Van Dyke does successfully while dancing with the penguins in Mary Poppins.)
Now that Pia has her own thread, I can talk a bit trivia about the song: it was not an American, but a German production, and the producer was Jack White, not the Jack White from the White Stripes, but the stage name of the German former football (soccer) pro and Schlager singer and producer Horst Nußbaum. He only ever produced trash, but he was immensely successful. He also was responsible for David Hasselhoff’s singing career in Germany.
and to think she toured with Frank Sinatra?
Shouldn’t this thread be moved to MPSIMS?
Rather to CS, I think.
ETA: I flagged it for a move.
I wasn’t sure how harsh people were going to get. But I’ll move it.
Tough crowd! Just being a bad actress who last worked decades ago is worthy of a pit thread? Anyway. . . I did see “The Lonely Lady” in a theater at the time. The only thing I remember was a line something like “There’s somethin’ comin’ out, and it stinks!” [Edit: I see it’s being moved.]
Side note: “Santa Clause Conquers the Martians” is credited to a “Glenville Mareth” and a “Paul L. Jacobson.” I haven’t been able to find anything about Glenville Mareth, so I suspect that’s a pseudonym, maybe someone from Glenville NY. There’s a razor-thin more info on Jacobson, which is probably his real name. He was apparently the treasurer of WTRI in Albany NY in the mid 1950s, and in 1965 after the success of “SCCTM,” he entered in a deal with producer Joseph E. Levine to produce a couple of thrillers, something that apparently never saw the light of day. For all I know, he is Glenville Mareth. Albany and Glenville aren’t that far apart.
A side conversation about Zadora in an unrelated Pit thread got moved off into its own thread. I don’t think that anyone set out to create a Pit thread specifically about her.
Surely you saw her in the 1988 Hairspray with Sonny Bono, Debbie Harry, Rick Ocasek, Jerry Stiller, and others? She played a pot-smoking beatnik.
I always kinda felt sorry for her.
She was just so bad, at everything!
Her name is cool.