“When the camera started rolling, it was just heaven,” I Deam of Jeannie star Barbara Eden recalls of the iconic ’60s TV show. But it didn’t start out that way.
“Larry [Hagman] said I scared him to death!” Barbara, 90, remembers of her first rehearsal with her onscreen flame. “I threw my arms around his neck and said, ‘Oh, Master!’ And he was like, ‘What is this woman doing?’
“In one case, Larry was sitting on the sofa and I had to jump in the air and land on it with my hand under my chin. We rehearsed it and it worked beautifully,” she tells. But when it came time to film, Barbara landed on Larry’s knee and cracked a tooth! “Oh, it was awful! Blood all over the place. We didn’t do anything like that again,” she laughs.
The wacky fantasy sitcom about a 2000-year-old genie and a NASA astronaut shot Barbara to worldwide fame.
Insiders have long insisted the situation frustrated Larry, who is said to have resented playing second fiddle to the former beauty queen. “Larry found himself in a show with a beautiful, half-naked girl, and there was no way it would be his show,” recalls the series’ creator Sidney Sheldon, who passed away in 2007 at age 89.
This story is from the January 10, 2022 edition of New Zealand Woman's Weekly.
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This story is from the January 10, 2022 edition of New Zealand Woman's Weekly.
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