Four Apes films, three characters, and not one part with anything in it. Natalie Trundy was a pleasant presence whom the series never gave a scene to play, and on her own account she did not mind.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) again and try to remember what Dr. Stephanie Branton does. She is kind to the chimpanzees. She drives. She stands beside Bradford Dillman looking concerned while Kim Hunter and Roddy McDowall get every line worth having. Natalie Trundy is on screen for a good deal of the film and it is hard to say she is in it at all, which is a comment on Paul Dehn's script more than on her.
She had been a child actor in the 1950s, in and out of live television, with a proper film part as Susan Carver in Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), and then a long gap. When she came back it was to the Apes sequels. There were four of them, all produced by Arthur P. Jacobs, whom she had married in 1968, and she played three different people: Albina, a telepathic mutant, in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970); the human scientist in Escape; and Lisa, Caesar's mate, under a chimpanzee mask in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Only one other actor in the series appeared as both human and ape. It is the sort of fact that gets repeated because there is not much else to say.
The versatility is real in the narrow sense: she turned up and did the job in whatever the make-up department handed her. But the parts were all the same part. Branton and Lisa are there to react, to soften a scene, to give the leads someone to talk to. Our reviews of Conquest and Battle do not mention her, and we did not leave her out from unkindness; the films did it first. Conquest is the angriest of the sequels and the one we rate, and its fury belongs to McDowall's Caesar. Lisa is behind a mask in a film that has time for nobody else.
We felt something close to sympathy watching Escape: two pleasant actors, Trundy and Dillman, handed kindness and a car and asked to make people out of them. It cannot be done, and they did not pretend otherwise. The series was funniest and saddest when Hunter and McDowall were talking, and Trundy's job was to stand nearby while they did.
The roles were widely put down to her marriage, and it is not hard to see why, though the charge says less than it seems to: these were cheap, quick films and nobody in them was asked for much. Trundy herself was unbothered. 'I really did them for fun, if you want to know the truth,' she said, and the honesty is more appealing than most of the parts. She made one more film, Huckleberry Finn (1974), and stopped. If you want to see what she could do, we have no obvious place to send you. The Apes films are worth an evening for other reasons, and she is in them.
Biography
Natalie Trundy (5 August 1940 – 5 December 2019) was an American actress. Born Natalie Trundy Campagna in Boston, Massachusetts, she began her career as a child performer on Broadway in the 1953 play A Girl Can Tell. She appeared in films including The Careless Years (1957) and Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation (1962), and made guest appearances on television series such as The Twilight Zone, Bonanza and Perry Mason.
Trundy is best known for her roles in the Planet of the Apes film series. She played the mutant Albina in Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Dr. Stephanie 'Stevie' Branton in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), and Lisa in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Her second husband, producer Arthur P. Jacobs, produced the series through his company APJAC Productions. She made her final screen appearance in a 1978 episode of Quincy, M.E..
