Donna Lyons Interviews Actress Pamelyn Ferdin

If you had a favorite television show growing up, there’s a pretty good chance Pamelyn Ferdin appeared on it. In addition to several series of her own, Pamelyn made memorable guest appearances on such programs as Star Trek, The Brady Bunch, The Monkees, Bewitched, Gunsmoke, Family Affair, and The Flying Nun. She played Felix Unger’s daughter, Edna, on multiple episodes of The Odd Couple, and is perhaps best known as the voice of Lucy Van Pelt in Peanuts TV specials and the feature film, A Boy Named Charlie Brown.

Pamelyn was the busiest child actor in Hollywood for the better part of a decade, performing in more than 200 television episodes, about 30 feature films and made-for-TV movies, and hundreds of television commercials, nearly all of them before she was out of her teens. As an actress, she performed with some of the legends of show business, acting alongside Jack Benny, Walter Brennan, John Cassavetes, Bing Crosby, Clint Eastwood, Gene Kelly, Elsa Lanchester, Shirley MacLaine, Dean Martin, Ray Milland, Maureen O’Sullivan, Geraldine Page, Vincent Price, Tony Randall, Cliff Robertson, and Jonathan Winters; as a singer, she introduced songs by such celebrated songwriters as Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Sammy Cahn and Burton Lane, Rod McKuen, and Richard and Robert Sherman; and as a dancer, she performed on stage and screen with Buddy Ebsen, Jerry Lewis, and Debbie Reynolds. She enjoyed the experience of working in one capacity or another with entertainment icons Walt Disney, Steven Spielberg, Charles M. Schulz, Dr. Seuss, Chuck Jones, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, and the world’s most famous four-legged TV star, Lassie.

Pamelyn began doing commercials at the age of three and graduated to feature films at the age of four, playing Shirley MacLaine’s and Dean Martin’s daughter in the hit comedy What a Way to Go! By the age of six she was the busiest child actor in the business.