'That Girl' Marlo Thomas Now Plays a Mom
May 4, 2002 — -- On the hit show Friends, Marlo Thomas plays the sophisticated mother of Jennifer Aniston's character Rachel, a sexy, unmarried young woman with a mind of her own.
What the show's Generation X audience might not know is that Thomas once played a similar role herself, as the star of That Girl, a pioneering sitcom that ran from 1966 to 1971 — before some of the Friends cast were even born. Her character Ann Marie, an independent young woman who put off marriage so she could have a career, was a symbol of strength and confidence to a generation of girls and young women.
As well as being the star of That Girl, Thomas owned the company that created and produced the show — an unusual combination in an era and an industry dominated by white males. The head of programming for ABC at the time wanted Thomas on the air, but couldn't find a good script.
Thomas had a radical idea. "There were no young girls on television at the time," she remembers thinking. So she proposed a new show about a young woman like her, who wanted to be an actress but whose parents just wanted to see get married — "a girl with a dream who really wants something," she told the ABC executive.
Ann had a boyfriend, Donald, but was adamant about putting her career before marriage — an attitude borrowed from Thomas' own life. Thomas held her ground even when she decided to take That Girl off the air in 1971. ABC executives wanted Ann and Donald to get married in the final episode, but Thomas refused. "I felt that would be unfair to the girls who'd watched us and believed in us. I felt that one show had to not end in a wedding," she said.
Although Thomas was the show's executive producer as head of Daisy Productions, she kept her executive status a secret and did not appear in the credits as executive producer. "I didn't want to push my power ... because it was a kind of a cat-and-mouse game of how to be strong, how not to give in, but how not to intimidate them."
An Inspiration to a Generation
