- Michele Lee opened up about her difficult relationship with Donna Mills when Mills joined Knots Landing on season 2
- On the April 8 episode of Lee, Mills and Joan Van Ark’s new podcast We’re Knot Done Yet, Lee shared that she initially felt threatened by Mills, which caused her to lash out
- Lee said opening up about her insecurities helped her and Mills become the close friends they are now
Michele Lee and Donna Mills might be great friends now, but their tenure on Knots Landing got off to a rocky start.
On the April 8 episode of their new Knots Landing podcast We’re Knot Done Yet, the former costars — alongside their fellow alumna Joan Van Ark — talked about their memories of joining the show, which premiered in 1979. Lee, 82, was part of the show’s main cast from the first season, playing Karen MacKenzie. She was the only character to appear in every episode.
Meanwhile Mills, 84, joined the show in season 2 as Abby Cunningham, the show’s biggest pot-stirrer. Mills had been working widely since the mid-’60s when she joined the series in 1980.
Lee explained on the podcast that since childhood, she had been “a little insecure,” in part because she was one of the tallest girls in school. It also led her to “talk a lot,” and she remembered getting kicked out of her high school choir because of it.
Mills said that those experiences made Lee “tougher,” and she agreed. “Sometimes things like that make you tougher, and you know I can be tough,” Lee said.
Then, Mills said, “I don’t know if you remember, but the first few months I was on the show, we had a little dust-up. Do you remember?”
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Lee said she did remember, but said she would call it a “tiff.”
“I have a director’s brain and I’m controlling,” she said, adding it’s something she’s “very happy” to admit. “Sometimes I can go over a line, but I think I know what I want and sometimes I just say it too loud.”
Lee remembered that she and Mills were filming with Ted Shackelford. “All of a sudden — I had no idea what I did wrong, of course I never do — but you and Ted gave me a look and you walked off the set,” Lee said. “I thought, ‘Holy s—, what just happened?’ ”
Mills remembered telling her, “Don’t push me around. If you want something, tell me, but don’t push me around. You can’t do that to me.” Lee said that was “pretty tough” of her, too.
“I think it got over a hump for us,” Mills said. “It made us better friends because we had confronted that and said it and went on.”
Lee remembered what she said when she called Mills to talk about it.
“What I explained to you was you made me feel insecure, not because of acting, because I felt you were so beautiful,” she said. “You were so beautiful. This goes back to high school … I wasn’t popular and all the girls were having fun and laughing.”
“I stood outside the window and watched everybody laugh and dance and play, but I wasn’t invited or at least I felt that I wouldn’t be invited,” she said. “So here comes Donna Mills. It turned into this feeling I had which is, she’s the popular one, she’s going to be the popular one and I don’t know how I’m gonna get through this.”
“And that’s why I explained to you that I was feeling not just odd and it was something to do with me and my background and brain, but it was a truth,” Lee said. She said she hoped telling Mills that would bring them “closer” as she shared “this vulnerability.” When she bossed Mills around, she said, it was a confidence she was hiding behind.
“There’s a bravado that you have that I think masks some insecurities,” Mills said, and Lee agreed.
“But I like what happened with us because we got beyond that,” Mills said. “We got to understand each other. We got to like each other. It’s not like it started out that way because it really didn’t.”
“The three of us girls got closer as time went by,” Lee said of her co-hosts. “It was a time when we could, as we were growing and we were getting older, that the three of us could understand each other in another level.”
Van Ark said that she values the connection of “sisterhood” the trio formed on set. “Girlfriendship is vital. Period,” she said.
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