Melody Anderson

Melody Anderson
Anderson at the Big Apple Convention in Manhattan, October 17, 2009.
Born	(1955-12-03) December 3, 1955 (age 61) Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Occupation	Actress, social worker work, public speaker
Years active	1977–1995
Website	www.counselingbymelody.com

Melody Anderson (born December 3, 1955) is a Canadian social worker and public speaker specializing in the impact of addiction on families. She is a retired actress, whose most high-profile role was playing Dale Arden in the 1980 adaptation of Flash Gordon. While doing singing, she also trained as an actress, leading to roles in films and television during the 1970s and 1980s.

Her first national exposure was as a guest star in the 1977 series Logan's Run and as a "Sweathog" in a 1977 episode of Welcome Back, Kotter. She made numerous guest appearances on television, including Archie Bunker's Place, Battlestar Galactica, Dallas, T. J. Hooker, CHiPs, the pilot episode of The A-Team and The Fall Guy. She had recurring roles on St. Elsewhere and Jake and the Fatman. She was the female lead of the NBC 1983 series Manimal. She was a guest star in the Murder, She Wrote episode "Prediction: Murder" in 1989.

She played the female lead Dale Arden in the cult classic Flash Gordon (1980) and the female lead Janet Gillis in Dead and Buried (1981). In 1983, she played the title role in a made-for-television film called Policewoman Centerfold, in which her character, a divorced police officer, is fired after posing nude for a men's magazine (based loosely on the true story of Springfield, Ohio patrolwoman Barbara Schantz, who was subsequently fired from her job after posing nude in Playboy magazine in the early 1980s). She appeared with Nicolas Cage in The Boy in Blue (1986). She starred in the made-for-television movie Beverly Hills Madam (1896), which starred Faye Dunaway. From 1992–93, Anderson portrayed Natalie Marlowe, and briefly her twin sister Janet Dillon, on the soap opera All My Children.