This is a unauthorized reproduction of an article from TV Guide online.
I'm putting it up here since the content on their page changes weekly. ~cathy

April 17, 2001
New every Thursday

Due to the volume of questions she receives, FlickChick cannot answer all questions or reply via personal e-mail.

Question: This question has been burning me up for ages, and no one seems to know the answer! The leading man in Girls Just Want to Have
Fun — which starred such now-famous actresses as Helen Hunt,
Shannon Doherty and Sarah Jessica Parker — was Lee Montgomery. Where is he now? Also, is he related to the late Elizabeth Montgomery of Bewitched? — Tanya

FlickChick: Canadian-born Lee Montgomery is no relation to Elizabeth Montgomery, who was the daughter of golden-age Hollywood actor Robert Montgomery. However, Lee does have a sister, Belinda, who has had a solid career in movies and TV, starting in the late '60s; he actually followed her into the business. A second sister, Tanis, dabbled in acting before deciding show business wasn't for her, and his father, Cecil Elliott Montgomery, was in radio in Canada. Born in Winnipeg on November 3, 1961, Lee Montgomery began his career as a child model and then segued into acting. His family moved to Toronto, and soon after Belinda moved to California to pursue her career. The rest of the family followed. Belinda was under contract to Universal, and the studio signed her baby brother as well. "It was great for us, because we worked in everything they could put us in, because they were paying us anyway. It was good in career terms and you got a lot of experience." Montgomery made his feature film debut in the Disney picture $1,000,000 Duck (1971), and by the mid-'80s had racked up an impressive collection of credits in movies and series TV. Unlike many child actors, Montgomery has nothing but good memories of his early years in front of the cameras. "Thank God I wasn't one of those child actors who was forced into it or had a terrible experience with it," he recalls. "I just had a lot of fun. Every year my parents would say, 'Do you want to keep doing this? If you don't, just say so and you can stop.' But I just loved it." Among his more memorable films were boy-and-his-rat movie Ben (1972); The Savage Is Loose (1974), starring and directed by George C. Scott; and Burnt Offerings (1976), with Bette Davis. "Bette Davis loved kids," Montgomery recalls, "which I wouldn't have expected. Or she loved me, anyway, and really took me under her wing."

Montgomery made a successful but short-lived transition to adult roles. Although the bubbly Girls Just Want to Have Fun has picked up a nostalgic cult following, it was a box office disappointment at the time of its initial release (and let's not even talk about what the critics had to say). Helen Hunt, Shannon Doherty, Sarah Jessica Parker and Jonathan Silverman all went on to high-profile movie and TV careers, but Montgomery did only two subsequent films and then dropped out of sight to pursue other interests. "I had always been very interested in music and in filmmaking, and with a friend of mine I had the opportunity to start a music video division at Paramount Pictures. I didn't want to pass that up, so I put acting on the back burner and did that for a year." The project then fell victim to a change of regime at Paramount. "The unfortunate thing is that they cut us off right when we were talking to people like Michael Bolton and Janet Jackson," Montgomery recalls. "I made some short films and music videos for bands that never really went anywhere, like Color of Sound," Montgomery continues. "I worked on some music-related projects. I had a couple of songs in a movie called Farewell, My Love (1999). And I recently got my first opportunity to do a soundtrack, for Alex Erkiletian's film Trigon: The Legend of Pelgidium." The film, an offbeat Western with supernatural overtones that stars Denise Crosby and Angus Scrimm, is due for release later this year.

Back to the Lee Montgomery Web Site