At that time I was making the largest salary known on television and I didn't want to see it die because those were the years paying off when I wasn't making anything.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I used to say when I was working in the theater that if I ever had five seasons of a hit TV show I'd never have to worry about money and wouldn't have to do anything I didn't want to do.
One of the reasons I didn't really want to do TV earlier in my career was because it is so life-consuming, and I wanted to spend time with my kids and be a mother.
I got a job as a series regular on a television show when I was in my 20s. It didn't get picked up. It only went for 13 or 15 episodes, but it was huge. It was just absolutely huge, and it made me put money in the bank, and I didn't have to worry about bills.
I always look back and say I should have made more. It should have been more lucrative, but it wasn't.
I started working in the mid-to-late Seventies, when television was not what it is now.
I did a terrible television pilot that was so badly written and dumb that it became a turning point for me and I decided that I would never accept a job just because I needed the money.
I wanted to quit the industry when I was eighteen and finish '70s', finish my contract on the show and go to college because I was pretty convinced that after '70s' and after being on a show for eight years that I would be very much pigeonholed for something specific that I didn't want to be a part of anymore.
In the days when I was the big hero, the money wasn't much. Nobody made anything on television in those days.
People say I owe a lot to television. The fact is I was a star long before television. What TV made me is unemployed.
I think the worst thing that could have happened to me would have been having a hit at 20. I don't know what that would have done to me. But instead, I had to scrape a living for years. And my first show, which opened in 1969, lost over £45,000, an absolute fortune then.