Melendy Britt

I’m going to level with you—I’m not sure my children fully believe me about what She-Ra was like when I was a kid. I’m a little hurt that Melendy Britt didn’t get a role in the new one. Did they offer her one? I don’t know. I had rather hoped Wiki Grayskull: The He-Man and She-Ra Wiki (of course it exists) would tell me, but they don’t even mention her on their page about She-Ra. She does have her own page, but it’s a stub that just provides a list of fifteen characters she voiced on the show—sixteen, if you count Adora and She-Ra as separate characters. Which I don’t think you necessarily should, especially on the older version of the show. Honestly, I think having her voice Light Hope would’ve been fun.

Oh, there’s more to her career than voicing half the cast of She-Ra. She also voiced basically every woman in Gotham in the Filmation New Adventures of Batman. (No one ever accused Filmation of spending money they didn’t have to.) She was in fact exceedingly busy in the ‘70s. Her TV premiere was in an episode of Then Came Bronson, and she was in a movie that same year with Harold Gould and Diana Muldaur. She has twenty-six credits in the 1970s, not counting multiple appearances on various TV shows. It was the busiest decade of her career, and she finished it up with Being There, where she’s very low billed as a character named Sophie.

Britt, unlike many other famous voice actors, has never been exclusively a voice actor. There is, after all, that Being There role. But she did two episodes of Falcon Crest even in the midst of her adventures on Etheria. She did The Rockford Files in the same year that she was all those Gothamites. To a lot of people, she’s probably best known as Woody’s girlfriend’s mother on an episode of Cheers. Even my younger readers (do I have younger readers?) might know her as both Gran-Gran on Avatar: The Last Airbender or Gloria on the third episode of Gilmore Girls.

I will say that there’s a certain joy in going through people’s careers when they’re more obscure like this. Today I learned that she was in a movie called Gray Lady Down, one of the ‘70s disaster movies. Not only does it star Charlton Heston and David Carradine, not only does it feature Stacy Keach and Ned Beatty, but it’s the film debut of both Christopher Reeve and Miles O’Keefe. I’m still not planning to watch the thing, not being a fan of ‘70s disaster movies, but that’s still a delightful thing to learn.

Britt is one of those people about whom there is sparse detail. IMDb knows she was married but doesn’t know when or to whom; her spouse’s name and their marriage dates are all question marks. She has two daughters, it seems. Unusually, there is information about commercial work, as she was apparently the first person who ever said that she was worth it for L’Oreal hair dye. She’s worked on stage. She was born on Halloween. She does show jumping. And if you need to know more about her, I guess ask her yourself.