The afterlife of the movie star with a single, iconic role is a curiosity. Between 1976 and 1979, Lynda Carter appeared in three seasons of Wonder Woman, a hit so huge that for those of us who saw it as children, she remains a somewhat mystical figure. Knight Rider was great, the A-Team was fun, but Wonder Woman – jumping between boulders, sparks flying from her wrist plates – was something else.
Here is Carter today, in a pastel-colored blazer on video chat from her home in Maryland, and although I’m a 46-year-old woman with two children and a mortgage, I can’t help it: I’m completely agog. “It was such a short part of my life, but it has made a bigger impact than any other thing I’ve done,” says Carter, who is 70 and looks nothing of the sort. Among the many reasons to love her, is her good grace in the face of a generation’s obsession with those three short years of her life.
