Melody Anderson's screen career is one role, Dale Arden in Flash Gordon (1980), and a decade of television around it. She played the heroine straight in a film that winked at everything else, and that is why the part still works.
Fi1m perspective
Watch the throne-room fight in Flash Gordon. An ordinary quarterback with no powers at all is taking on a galactic emperor's guards with a football and a running play, and on the sidelines a travel agent in a borrowed gown is cheering him on as if it were a Saturday afternoon at a college game. The line is "Go Flash go", and Anderson put it in herself. It is the moment the film's joke lands cleanest, and it lands because she is not in on it. Dale believes in Flash, and that is the whole part.
Mike Hodges's film is knowing, loud and dressed like nothing else, and Max von Sydow plays Ming dead straight. Sam J. Jones is a handsome blank at the centre. Anderson's job was to be the ordinary person the audience could stand beside, and the script writes Dale to scream and then, oddly, to fight. She is better at the second. We laughed loudly and without irony at that football sequence, and a good deal of the laugh is hers: she plays a cheerleader in a palace with no more self-consciousness than she would bring to a car park.
There was not much before it and the rest was mostly television. She came to acting from a journalism degree and modelling, with guest spots on Logan's Run and Welcome Back, Kotter and a part in John Carpenter's Elvis (1979) opposite Kurt Russell. After Dale came Dead & Buried (1981), a horror film, and Manimal (1983), where she was the female lead in Glen A. Larson's short-lived series, then a steady run of guest parts on The A-Team, Murder, She Wrote, T.J. Hooker and The Fall Guy. Firewalker (1986) put her beside Chuck Norris in an adventure comedy, and reviewers at the time found the material around her thin. She took over a role on All My Children for most of a year from 1992, left acting in the mid-1990s and became a clinical social worker.
What she had was a fit for one kind of heroine: energetic, straight-playing, American in the comic-strip sense, the person who keeps her head while the sets go mad around her. That is a narrower gift than it sounds, and 1980s television had plenty of use for it. It is also why there was never a second Flash Gordon for her: the film needed a Dale and there was only ever one film like it. By her account Hodges gave the cast room to rehearse and come up with ideas, and the one idea of hers we can point to is the one everyone remembers.
If you have only seen her once, you have seen the right thing. Watch the sidelines.
Biography
Melody Anderson is a Canadian former actress and licensed clinical social worker. Born on 3 December 1955 in Edmonton, Alberta, she trained as an actress after early work in performance and singing, and appeared in films and television from the late 1970s onwards.
Her best-known role is as Dale Arden in the 1980 film Flash Gordon. Other credits include Dead & Buried (1981), Firewalker (1986) and a recurring part on the soap opera All My Children (1992–1993). She retired from acting in the mid-1990s.
Anderson holds a BA in Journalism from Carleton University and an MSW from New York University. She works as a therapist and public speaker specialising in the effects of addiction on families.
