Brown-eyed Angel
Oh, how I luv me some pre-1976 Angie.... In case you didn't know, her '70s cop show almost ruined her. The first season was good, but by the middle of the second season, her luscious feminine charm was rolled-back (due to complaints that she was "too sexy") and, in my mind, it killed the show and she never quite recovered career-wise. She still worked here-and-there, but it just wasn't the same, and what was so special about her screen presence was removed...
And it was probably partly her fault. She said decades later that "
when I tried to be sexy, I was ludicrous!" --- which was not true at all, but she was apparently charisma-shamed by her detractors into taking the edge out of her focusing purr in order to avoid seeming foolish. Whatever the impetus for the change, it hurt her. So someone psyched her out.
Sometimes you just need to ignore the criticism and go with your instincts.
'60s critics were generally kind to Angie Dickinson -- if not always her movies, granting that if she'd come up during the earlier studio system of the '30s and '40s, she might have fared better... She's a
good actress, coming off as almost as a living Venus whose enigmatic delivery is a measured and ironic purr, seductive yet focused. All that stopped by the middle of the second season of her TV series, and she rarely got a good review again:
