Heather Young

Heather Young
Performer1980
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Portrays:	Lollipop star
Date of Birth:	April 01,1945
Date of Death:	Missing required parameter 1=month!
Age:	81
Nationality:	USA
Related Media
		@ BW Media
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IMDb profile

Heather Young (born Patricia Kay Petersen, April 1, 1945, Bremerton, Washington) is an American actress who portrayed the Lollipop star in Galactica 1980's "The Night the Cylons Landed, Part II". She is best known for her two-season role as stewardess Betty Ann Hamilton in Irwin Allen's science fiction series Land of the Giants (1968–1970), co-starring with then-child actor Stefan Arngrim. Science fiction, she later acknowledged, was not her favorite genre.

Career

Young was born in Bremerton, Washington, the hometown of her mother, Charlotte Hunter Petersen, though she grew up identifying with Cache Valley, Utah, the area her father's family called home. She was the eldest of five children. Her father, Mervin Petersen, was a civil engineer with the U.S. Geological Survey who also served as an LDS bishop in Rolla for eleven years; his civil engineering work took the family to several states, and Young attended schools in Hyde Park, Utah; Riverton, Wyoming; Tacoma Park, Maryland; and Rolla, Missouri, before spending three years at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Her early ambitions were toward nursing or physical therapy, but her involvement with the Mormon Church steered her toward singing.

At BYU she sang in a trio with two fellow students, Sandi Jensen and Salli Flynn, touring widely under the university's Program Bureau, including a three-month USO circuit through Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Guam, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, the Philippines, and Hawaii in 1964. During her third year, 20th Century Fox came to the campus to accept the family movie award for The Sound of Music; organisers asked Young to perform a medley, and Fox executive assistant Harry Sokolov, who was in attendance, invited her to audition at the studio. Around the same time, the trio secured a summer engagement performing on the Tomorrowland stage at Disneyland, where they were offered an on-the-spot recording contract by Capitol Records; Young's higher voice did not suit the group's sound without her, while Sandi and Salli later signed with Capitol as a duo and became regulars on The Lawrence Welk Show.

At the end of the summer, Young contacted Fox and accepted a contract. When she registered for SAG under the name Pattie Petersen, the guild informed her that another actress already held it: Patty Petersen, the younger sister of Paul Petersen and a cast member of The Donna Reed Show. She chose "Heather," a name she had long favoured, having rejected the alternative "Patty Kay" as too reminiscent of "patty cake." Her Fox casting director then asked whether she had attended Brigham Young University, and upon hearing that she had, said: "We'll call you 'Heather Young' after your school." Fox enrolled her in acting and dance classes alongside fellow contractees including Tom Selleck, Jacqueline Bisset, Lyle Waggoner, Linda Harrison, and James Brolin.

In 1967, Young accumulated several television credits under the Fox contract: she appeared in the Batman two-parter "The Contaminated Cowl"/"The Mad Hatter Runs Afoul" as President Johnson's secretary, in "Tempest in a Texas Town" on Judd for the Defense as Terry Ann Brendler (billed in the broadcast credits as "Patti Petersen") and in the third-season Felony Squad episode "Kiss Me, Kill You" as Aggie, a character who conspires with her brother (played by Jeremy Clyde of the duo Chad and Jeremy) to stage two disappearances. She also appeared briefly as the girl with the megaphone in the Fox theatrical comedy A Guide for the Married Man (1967) and guest starred as Joan in "Town of Terror," the final episode of Allen's The Time Tunnel (1967).

Allen subsequently cast Young as stewardess Betty Ann Hamilton in Land of the Giants, which ran for 51 episodes over two seasons from 1968 to 1970. She described the series as offering "plenty of action but not enough acting" and found the role "fun but not fulfilling." She had no interest in science fiction and considered Betty too stereotyped, privately describing the character as "a bit too banal, too '8x10 glossy'," but her Fox contract gave her little room to decline, and Allen had chosen her specifically because she remained under contract. Filming of the second season was complicated by her pregnancy; she continued working until two weeks before the birth, performing more stunt work than in all previous episodes combined, and was frequently photographed from the waist up or written out of episodes. Her first child, a son named Brandon, was born on August 30, 1969.

After Land of the Giants was cancelled, Young appeared in two episodes of the religious anthology series Insight (1969–1970), including one alongside former Land of the Giants guest actors Paul Carr and John Marley, as well as a guest role with Christopher Connelly in "The Dangerous Airs of Amy Clark." Connelly and Young also shared the lead in the television movie In Name Only (1969), playing a couple who discover they are not legally married. She appeared as LuAnn, a student nurse, in the television pilot Oh, Nurse (1972).

Between 1972 and 1980, Young did not appear in film or television but performed in stage musicals, taking lead roles in two productions of Annie as Grace (opposite Harve Presnell), two productions of Camelot as Guinevere, and Kiss Me, Kate as Kate, among others.

In 1980, Young returned to Hollywood for a guest appearance in Galactica 1980's "The Night the Cylons Landed, Part II", billed in the credits as "Star." The booking came through her friendship with producer Glen A. Larson, who was also a member of the Mormon faith; Young rehearsed the role for a full week before filming, but developed a migraine on the shoot day and was unable to complete her close-up shots. In the episode, Captain Troy and Lieutenant Dillon, ducking into a theater to evade pursuing police, are mistakenly pressed into performing onstage in a production of "Good Ship Lollipop." Young's character, the star of the production, performs "On the Good Ship Lollipop", wearing a blond wig styled in "Shirley Temple" ringlets, before Troy and Dillon activate their invisibility fields and carry her offstage.

In the early 1980s, Young contracted with Paramount for Foul Play, a television series adaptation of the 1978 film, and was set to play the lead role originated by Goldie Hawn. After she had signed the contract, the studio redirected her toward another project instead. "Turns out, it was Bosom Buddies, with Tom Hanks," she later said. "What an idiot I was. That is a lesson I'll never forget."

After stepping away from acting, Young wrote three full-scale stage musicals; the most widely produced was an adaptation of Jane Eyre that played community theaters in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, BYU (in venues of 1,500 to 2,000 seats), and a theatre near Disneyland. Under the name Patricia York, she also recorded an album titled Quiet Before the Storm, for which she wrote several of the songs and recorded with session musicians in Nashville.

Young has attended a number of conventions celebrating Land of the Giants and fellow Irwin Allen productions, appearing alongside cast members from Lost in Space including Marta Kristen, Angela Cartwright, Bill Mumy, and June Lockhart.

Personal life

On June 14, 1968, Young married David Youkstetter — the two had met in California and had not known each other during their overlapping years at BYU — in a ceremony at the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. At the time, Youkstetter was a business administrator at TRW, an aerospace and electronics firm; by 1979, the couple had settled in Sonoma County, California, where Youkstetter worked as a youth counselor and both served as youth leaders and foster parents. The couple eventually had five children together and took in foster children for approximately fifteen years. By the late 1980s, the family had relocated to Salt Lake City, Utah. Young and Youkstetter divorced in the early 1990s, after which she changed her name to Patricia York. "When I got divorced, I changed it to York, just because it was so much easier," she said. "He died a few years ago. We actually lived together in the same house, the last eight years of his life."

References