Barbara Feldon: The Transformation Of The Only Surviving Cast Member Of Get Smart

From sitcoms depicting American life to scripted horror series, the '60s saw a major shift in television. Among them was the conception of "Get Smart," a 1960 spy series that was a satirical reimagining of characters like James Bond and the clumsy Inspector Clouseau from "The Pink Panther." The sitcom was created by industry legends Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, and it starred Don Adams and Barbara Feldon as the married couple who both happen to be agents tasked with solving top-secret cases for a government agency.

With five seasons, a premature 1995 series remake, and a 2008 film starring Steve Carell — who was a cast member of "The Office" at the time — and Anne Hathaway, who was in the middle of her own stunning transformation, it's safe to say "Get Smart" left its mark on pop culture. And Feldon's character, Agent 99, proved to be a strong feminist icon. "I thank Mel Brooks and Buck Henry for creating Agent 99, who was my imaginary mentor," Feldon told Remind Magazine in 2023. "She was way more of a feminist than I was in 1965, but I finally caught up to her by the end of the series in 1970."

As of this writing, Feldon is the only surviving "Get Smart" cast member. In 2026, she celebrated her 93rd birthday, and long before that, she began building an impressive legacy. The transformation of Barbara Feldon includes legendary TV shows, a writing career, and more.

Raised in a suburb outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Barbara Feldon — born Barbara Anne Hall — . was the youngest of two. On a June 2026 episode of the "Julian Schlossberg's Movie Talk" podcast, Feldon shared that she was very attached to her mother, and this attachment only amplified after her mother left the family for an extended period when she was a toddler. "It created an addiction to her when she came back," she said. "And she disappeared because she and my dad were living separately at that time."

When she was 6 years old, Feldon was given a small triangle solo in an assembly for her school's percussion band. Though her role in the performance was relatively small, it still unlocked something in her — and she wanted to continue performing. This wasn't due to the fun she had on stage, but rather her mother's reaction to the performance as a whole. "That was absolutely the beginning of my fate to be in show business because my mother was sitting in the middle level ... looking at me. Concentrating on me, and I dinged, and I saw her — sort of through the triangle — I saw her watching me, and I never wanted to get off that stage," she recalled.

As a kid, the future TV star dove headfirst into the performing arts. Barbara Feldon studied ballet, trained at the Pittsburgh Playhouse, and graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology with a degree in drama. Then, she made her way to New York City, where she found early success in the 1957 revival of "The Ziegfeld Follies." During her stint on "The Ziegfeld Follies," a journalist from The New York Times came in and asked the group of showgirls a few trivia questions for a section in the publication. According to her 2007 interview with the Archive of American Television, Feldon, unbeknownst to her until the article was published, had a perfect score. 

Evidently, producers of "The $64,000 Question" — a trivia show conceived in the mid-1950s — saw her NYT trivia score and decided to invite her to be on the show. She signed on, chose William Shakespeare as her expert category, and studied nonstop for the show. All of that studying paid off, as she ultimately won the competition, electing to continue past the main $64,000 prize and going on to earn $96,000 in winnings. "I did get the $64,000. So, I did win that, which I didn't even want because I was just newly poor and I was enjoying it," she quipped.

After "The $64,000 Question," Barbara Feldon had to figure out her next career move. Unfortunately, "The Ziegfeld Follies" didn't help her land anything substantial afterward. According to a 2005 interview with the Television Academy Foundation at Emerson College, a close friend of Feldon's was seeing success as a model and encouraged her to follow suit. "She shaped me up and slimmed me down, and opened some doors for me, and the modeling world opened up, and that was another venture that I enjoyed very, very much," she said.

Not only did the modeling world open up for Feldon, but it stayed open throughout the start of her on-screen career. Soon thereafter, she became the face of Revlon decades before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, promoting several of their products throughout the '60s. One of her more well-known gigs was an ad for their men's hair pomade, Top Brass, which mostly ran throughout the mid-'60s. Now known as the "rug commercial," Feldon's playfully suggestive delivery became a staple of her commercial work. She also appeared in Revlon ads for Fabulash mascara, Colors Avant Garde foundation, and more.

In a 2016 interview with Forbes, Feldon shared that she was recognized in public for the first time thanks to one of her Revlon ads. "I walked into the dry cleaners one day, and she looked at me in a different way. It was like, 'Oh my God, you're the girl in that commercial!'" she recalled. "I was bemused and thought, 'It's just a commercial, but isn't that strange and peculiar?'"

In the mid-'60s, Barbara Feldon was on the verge of finding the role that'd later define her entire acting career. Before that, however, she made small strides, briefly appearing in various TV shows such as "East Side/West Side," "The Nurses," and "Slattery's People." One of her more important guest roles on television came in 1965, when she appeared in an episode of "The Man from U.N.C.L.E," a classic spy series that was a big hit at the time.

This was a big moment for Feldon's career. As she said in a 2026 interview with "That's Classic!," that was her third-ever television acting role. "I mean, 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E' ... it was the most spectacular show on the air at the time, and I had done George's show ['East Side/West Side'] and 'Mr. Broadway,' and I think 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E' was the next thing I did," she recalled. "So, I was very inexperienced at doing television shows." 

On the series, which starred David McCallum and Robert Vaughn, Feldon also shared the screen with acting legend Cesar Romero. On a 2023 episode of "A Spy Movie Podcast," she recalled just how nervous, yet excited, she was to share the screen with Romero. "I think my scenes seemed to be more with Cesar, and he was such a darling," she said. "Everybody was so nice, and it was fun, and it was like, 'Oh, my God! I'm on 'Man from U.N.C.L.E.' I can't believe it!'"

From 1965 to 1970, Barbara Feldon played Agent 99 in the secret agent parody sitcom "Get Smart." She landed the role of the oh-so chic and savvy Agent 99, after producers saw her play an industrial agent on "Mr. Broadway," a short-lived CBS series.

However, this career-defining role almost did not come to be. In her 2007 Archive of American Television interview, Feldon noted that she initially turned down the five-year contract because she didn't want to relocate from New York to California. "I thought, 'Five years? I'll be ancient in five years. There's no possible way I could do this.' I just couldn't do it," she recalled. After some time, she was then offered a two-year contract, to which she agreed.

Shortly after they began filming the series, Feldon's job was up in the air — and no, it did not have anything to do with her performance. After she landed the role of Agent 99, "Get Smart" producers informed Feldon that her Revlon deodorant advert conflicted with one of the show's sponsors, a company that was also selling deodorant products at the time. "Each day, I waited in dread for NBC to remove me from the set," she said in Remind Magazine in 2023. "Miraculously, it didn't happen." She would go on to be nominated for two Emmys for her work on the show. And as for Feldon's two-year contract? She ultimately decided to stay for the entire series run after all.

In 1970, after five seasons, "Get Smart" was done. "I was quite happy, because I felt it was time," Barbara Felton told Closer Weekly in 2026. "When you do the same character for five years, you're not really challenging yourself or growing as a performer." However, thanks to a little thing called typecasting, she hit a bit of a lull after her time on the hit sitcom. "I think for a while people were afraid to cast me in anything dramatic because they'd see me on the screen and think they're supposed to laugh," she said in her conversation with the Archive of American Television. "The first year after 'Get Smart,' I didn't work at all."

Throughout the year '70s, Feldon popped up on both scripted and variety shows. But then, she scored a leading role in the 1975 made-for-TV movie"Let's Switch!" Feldon and Barbara Eden, who was in the midst of her own stunning transformation, starred opposite one another as former college friends leading vastly different lives. In "Freaky Friday" fashion, Feldon and Eden's characters swapped their lifestyles, and comedy ensued.

In her aforementioned 2026 "That's Classic!" interview, Feldon said the project was a breath of fresh air following the success of "Get Smart." "Well, first of all, it was huge for me to act with a woman. And I think that's the only performance in my whole career where I acted with a woman," she said. "Because I was hired to be the skirt. I was always hired to be on the arm of the man. And I never got a chance to act with women, which I sort of longed to do."

When she was still on "Get Smart," Barbara Feldon considered leaving the episodic series for a regular spot on "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," a sketch comedy show on which she appeared from 1967 to 1968. She ultimately decided to stay put on "Get Smart," but her love of sketch and variety comedy shows did not wane. In fact, as previously mentioned, Feldon went on a number of variety shows after "Get Smart," such as "The Tim Conway Comedy Hour" and "The Carol Burnett Show." Her most memorable appearance was on the 1974 comedy show "The Dean Martin Comedy World," which she co-hosted with Jackie Cooper and Nipsey Russell.

In her aforementioned chat with the Archive of American Television, Feldon did not mince words when talking about her time on variety shows. "I loved it more than anything," she gushed. "Doing sketch comedy, I thought, 'This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.' I did a whole lot of the variety shows, and just being silly, and rehearsing for three days, then getting up in front of an audience. ... It was just playing, and there's no waiting time. You're rehearsing full-time because you're dancing and singing, and everything, and so you get there, and you just do the show."

In 1958, Barbara Feldon married her first husband, Lucien Verdoux-Feldon. Their relationship unraveled, however, in the wake of his struggles with addiction, mishandling of finances, and overall deceptive behavior. They officially divorced in 1967. She then struck up a relationship with "Get Smart" producer Burt Nodella, who she was with until 1979. After their long-term romantic partnership came to an end, she embraced being single.

On a 2014 episode of "Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast," Feldon shared that her own experience being single, as well as other people's experiences, inspired her to pen her 2003 self-help book, "Living Alone and Loving It." "A few years ago, a friend asked me to do a seminar at a seminar center. ... So, I decided to do a lecture on how to live alone and enjoy it, you know? And then when I got done with the lecture, I thought, 'Oh, this is a book,'" she explained.

While Feldon isn't an actor who has never been married, she is an actor who knows it's more than fine not to be married, despite societal expectations. "I learned how to live alone really happily. I've met a number of people — men and women — who feel living by themselves is a second-rate life," she said in Forbes in 2016. "I thought that was sad, and since I had this technique of living alone, I decided to write a book."

Barbara Feldon took on a number of roles over the years, including a guest spot on "Cheers," Agent 99 in both the "Get Smart, Again" movie and the short-lived 1995 "Get Smart" series, and voice-over gigs for "Square One Television" and "American Experience." In the early 2000s, Feldon shifted her focus onto writing instead of acting. Her final acting role was in the 2006 comedy "The Last Request."

In a 2018 interview with Closer Weekly, Feldon suggested that she wasn't as drawn to acting as one might assume. "I just never had the acting itch," she said. Feldon, who moved back to New York City in the 1970s after spending over a decade in Los Angeles, evidently didn't totally gel with the Tinseltown lifestyle and was ready to ditch the Hollywood scene for good. "There's so much artistic and intellectual stimulation in New York. Every day is different," she said. "I was longing to come back."

It seems even early on in her career Feldon had a relatively chill view on what it means to be a professional actor. As she said in a 1967 interview with the Waco-Tribune Herald (via Click Americana), "To me, acting was only a business. It still is. I love my work but can't honestly say I have ever sought it in order to become a super-star."

In 2022, another Barbara Feldon book hit the shelves. This time around, she pivoted away from the self-help genre and wrote a memoir, "Getting Smarter." As she said in an interview with KTLA 5, the book, which digs into her tumultuous relationship with Lucien Verdoux-Feldon, had been in the works for some time. "It had been sitting in a drawer for years, but I've been wanting to tell the story of coming to New York as a kid and meeting this glamorous Frenchman who stepped right out of the pages of a romance novel ... and falling in love, and the consequences of that relationship," she said. 

While unpacking past trauma and grief can be a difficult undertaking, Feldon welcomed the opportunity with open arms. On a 2023 episode of "A Spy Movie Podcast," she said that some of the more challenging pieces of her life — such as her first marriage — were actually kind of exciting to revisit through her current lens. "It was so much fun to relive it, you know," she said. "It wasn't so much catharsis because I don't think there was much left to be cathartic about once I finished psychoanalysis. I'd kind of exhausted every possible link to catharsis. But it was pure pleasure, and I could enjoy the romance of it."