I’m surprised that I haven’t seen this on the Boards yet. It was in the news yesterday. Melody Patterson has died at the not very advanced age of 66. The reports don’t say why, but she’s apparently been in poor health since breaking her back (!) some years ago.
I was surprised how young she started out – she was only 15 when she auditioned for her most famous role on F Troop. Her career was incredibly short. Except for a role in a straight-to-video flick in 1989, her career spanned only a decade, and started when she was 13-14.
In recent years she apparently started writing internet essays “Wrangling with Jane”.
Weird thing is that Pepper Mill was just telling me a couple of days ago (before the announcement of Patterson’s death) about how she landed the F Troop part while still a teenager by lying about her age (although even Pepper hadn’t realized just how young she was at the time). We hadn’t thought about Wrangler Jane for years before that.