Get Smart Star Barbara Feldon Reveals Why She Left Hollywood

More than 50 years after Barbara Feldon, 84, debuted as Agent 99 opposite Don Adams’ Maxwell Smart in the 1965 to 1970 spoof Get Smart, she is opening up to Closer Weekly about why she left Hollywood.

Barbara moved to the Big Apple in 1977, leaving LA behind. “I just never had the acting itch,” Barbara, who retired in 2006, explains to Closer.

Barbara and Don on Get Smart.

“There’s so much artistic and intellectual stimulation in New York,” she tells Closer. “Every day is different.” Looking back on her time in LA, “it was like a 12-year interruption of my life in New York,” says Barbara, a Pittsburgh-area native who moved further east after graduating with a drama degree from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1955. “I was longing to come back.” In other words, she missed New York… that much!

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