Donna mills: she got what she wanted on '80s TV with power, shoulder pads and makeup. Here, Camille Paglia revisits an unlikely feminist icon

Interview, Nov, 2002 by Camille Paglia

Before she won the vixen role of Abby Cunningham on CBS' Knots Landing in 1980, Donna Mills had made nearly 20 TV movies where she played victims stalked by stranglers and rapists. In her nine years on Knots (currently being rebroadcast by the Soapnet Network), she made Abby one of the strongest and most fascinating women characters in pop history. Mills gave Abby intelligence, wit, grace and style.

Treating men as tools, Abby is a fusion of the mythic femme fatale with the blonde American cheerleader. (Sandy, the Olivia Newton-John role in Grease, 1978, was based on Mills as a Chicago teenager.) Abby is fashion personified--a shimmering apparition glittering like a Byzantine cult object. She's like a self-created Warhol superstar, living in a virtual world of her own divine fabulousness.

A resident of Los Angeles (near which Knots Landing was set) for over 30 years, Mills is executive producer of her own production company. She has sponsored and starred in many TV movies exploring controversial social issues, and she is a prominent activist for causes such as environmentalism and reproductive rights.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Hello, Donna Mills. It's somewhat mind-boggling to be talking to you!

DONNA MILLS: Well, I'm very happy that we are.

CP: Here's what I've been telling my classes at the University of the Arts since the mid-'80s about your creation of Abby Cunningham. When the history of feminism is rewritten accurately, Joan Collins' performance as Alexis Carrington on Dynasty and yours as Abby Cunningham on Knots Landing will be seen as the pivotal roles in popular culture that had a revolutionary impact on women's behavior and self-image. You showed women around the world how to integrate power in the workplace with female sexual power. Joan's persona is very European, but you're the one who created the realistic American version. You showed what it was like to actually work in an office and also be a harried single parent, negotiating between work and home. And you created a sexy style for hard-driving businesswomen that's lasted for 20 years. So that's what I've been saying.

DM: God. [both laugh] Wow. Thank you.

CP: I've followed your work since one of my favorite movies, Play Misty for Me, came out in 1921. So I'm quite aware that you are not Abby and that you created her.

DM: Abby was the first time I'd been able to play the bad girl. I was always the goody-two-shoes before that. You know, when they called me about the role, I thought Knots Landing was a show about a houseboat with Andy Griffith! At the beginning, the show was much less sophisticated--I was basically a bookkeeper in a used-car lot. But I kept screaming at the producers. I said, Nobody wants to come home from a hard day working and turn on the TV and see the inside of a garage!" So I kept bugging them about making it more upscale, because I felt Abby, through her cleverness and business sense, was a character who would move up. And that's what she did.

CP: So you're the one who made Abby evolve toward that lavish fashion presentation that I adored through the '80s. It was totally out of sync with where feminism was at the time. In Hollywood, Meryl Streep was on top, and beauty and glamour were out. At the Oscars, it was chic to underdress--glamour was frivolous. But I felt that what you were doing with Abby was in the main line of old Hollywood--the high glamour style that Madonna would also resurrect in the mid-'80s. Most women viewers loved your use of fashion.

DM: I found through my fan mail that women really liked it and wanted a role model. They followed what Abby did. One reason was because Abby always won.

CP: In the '70s, women were moving into the workplace but were being sold the severe John Molloy dress-for-success look--very frumpy and unisex. By the '80s, women felt more comfortable with power and were looking for a way to recover their femininity. And that's where you were truly cutting-edge. You sensed the historical moment.

DM: I thought it was very important that femininity wasn't lost.

CP: That's a big difference between Alexis and Abby. Joan Collins' performance was female, while yours was feminine. You recovered the fragility and delicacy, the small gestures of femininity. I always attributed it to your ballet training. Dance gave you exquisite poise. You drew on fairy-tale princesses in Romantic ballet--Swan Lake, Giselle.

DM: That's certainly what I grew up with--ballet and musical comedy. My mother taught ballroom dancing and, I think, would have liked to have been a dancer herself. So she pushed me a lot when I was very young, but I loved it. All I really wanted to be was a dancer. There's a discipline in dance that you don't get anywhere else.

CP: I'm always drawn to actors onscreen who have dance training. I feel that choreography and body language are the most fundamental tools of communication and that film and TV are still, in some sense, silent. People vastly overestimate words in a script. So much comes from body language and facial expression. On Knots Landing, you were pushing the medium of television, making it cinematic. As a dancer, you understood physical space and props--doorways, a desk, a couch, pens, telephones. My favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock, was a master of that physical dimension. This is a fundamental of film acting that's been lost in the last two decades of dizzying special effects. You gave a fantastic lesson in how to make the most of a role when the camera's on you.