Whatever Happened to Cathy Lee Crosby, TV’s Original Wonder Woman?
When the classic comic book character Wonder Woman made her first appearance on TV in 1974, viewers were presented with a very different version of the Amazonian princess than the one that would be made famous by Lynda Carter just a year or so later. In that first television movie, Wonder Woman was a blonde, and her costume was, well, let’s just say, quite different from what comic book fans were accustomed to — thought her name was still Diana Prince and she still fought crime. If my memory serves me correctly, it was the first time I had ever watched anything with Cathy Lee Crosby in it.
Over the course of the next few decades, Cathy Lee would become a fixture in both movies and on TV. Born and raised in Southern California, her parents had found success in the entertainment industry, and from a very young age, she showed great promise as a tennis player. She was so good, in fact, that she was able to turn professional and actually played at Wimbledon twice.
In her mid-twenties, Cathy Lee made the decision to retire from the sport and focus on her new passion: acting. Because of her athleticism and natural beauty, Cathy Lee didn’t seem to have much difficulty getting offers. In the late ’60s, she found herself on the TV series It Takes a Thief with Robert Wagner, and in 1973 she starred with Walter Matthau, Bruce Dern, and Louis Gossett Jr. in The Laughing Policeman. But it was the role of Wonder Woman in 1974, co-starring Mr. Roarke himself, Ricardo Montalban, that really caught my attention.
The TV movie surprised a lot of people. It was patterned after a brief period in the comics where Diana Prince lost all of her superpowers and became a government agent. This version of Wonder Woman was kind of like an American version of Diana Rigg‘s Emma Peel from the British television program The Avengers.
Everett Collection
I remember being excited when I saw the TV Guide listing for the movie, and then somewhat less excited after it aired. Still, it was better than nothing, and when ABC re-ran the movie a few months later, I watched it again. As the years have rolled by, I have been able to catch this movie multiple times, and I’ve decided that it’s pretty decent. You just have to take it for what it is.
Just a year later, in 1975, ABC premiered a second TV movie version of Wonder Woman. This time, they got it right. That version was so much closer to the character that we’d all grown to love in the comic books. Even though Gal Gadot has been pretty amazing as Wonder Woman on the big screen most recently, I still say that no one has played the character better than Lynda Carter.
In interviews, Cathy Lee has said that she turned down an offer to actually reprise the role of Wonder Woman before ABC cast Carter. And I think everyone will agree that we’re better off because of her decision to say no. At the end of the day, we got a better incarnation of Wonder Woman, and Cathy Lee would soon find success as one of the three hosts of the ABC television variety series That’s Incredible! which ran from 1980 to 1984 — and according to the nostalgic website Skooldays was “awarded the Most Sadistic Show award by Time Magazine” due to the program’s content, which often skewed towards all sorts of mishaps as well as stunts that didn’t go quite right.
After That’s Incredible!, Cathy Lee cashed in on the fitness craze. She produced exercise videos, and even as she graduated into her forties, she was a poster child for good health and physical fitness, still landing movie offers and modeling gigs.
Cathy Lee’s personal life has been a bit of a roller coaster ride. She was married to a feller named Alexander Ingle for a couple of years during the late 1960s. According to her bio on the AAE Speakers , she was also “in a relationship with football star Joe Theismann throughout most of the 1980s. They split up sometime after Theismann retired from football with a career-ending injury in 1985.”
Aside from a That’s Incredible! reunion special in 2002, the past quarter century has definitely been a bit less hectic for Cathy Lee. As acting opportunities slowed down, Cathy Lee found time to act as a special ambassador for children for the United Nations, a member of the Board of Directors of our nation’s Congressional Award, and the founder and chairperson of the Get High On Yourself Foundation. You know, it’s awesome to see individuals who have attained a certain level of fame still look for ways to serve others.