Melinda Fee was born October 7, 1942, into a life already touched by the business. Her mother was Astrid Allwyn, an actress from the old Hollywood days, which means Melinda grew up around the strange perfume of performance — that mix of glamour and exhaustion that clings to anyone who’s ever worked under lights.
Her father wasn’t in the movies. He was an insurance executive, a man of numbers and policies, the kind of grounded presence that probably kept the household from floating away entirely into fantasy. Melinda stood between those worlds: art and practicality, stage dreams and real-life paperwork.
She went to USC, graduated with honors with a degree in drama. That says something — she wasn’t a careless dreamer, she was serious, disciplined. Then she studied in Sweden for a year at the University of Uppsala, which feels almost poetic. An American actress-to-be walking through Scandinavian winters, learning something quieter than Hollywood teaches.
But eventually the pull of home — and television — brought her back.
Melinda Fee wasn’t built for movie-star immortality. She wasn’t destined for giant billboards or tabloid mythology. Her career belonged to the living room. The daily rhythm of American television. The flickering serial life where stories never end, they just keep going until the actors age out or the audience stops watching.
Her first starring role was on Love of Life, one of those early soaps where emotion was currency and every face looked like it carried a secret. Television in that era was relentless. You didn’t shoot a scene once and move on — you lived inside the machine, day after day.
She became a familiar presence in soap operas, which is its own kind of acting purgatory and paradise. She played Charlotte Waring Fletcher Bauer on Guiding Light from 1971 to 1973. Then Mary Anderson on Days of Our Lives in the early 1980s. Then Olivia Welles on Santa Barbara in the late 1980s.
Soap actors are a special breed. They don’t get the luxury of weeks of rehearsal or multiple takes. They perform emotion like factory work — grief on Tuesday, betrayal on Wednesday, love on Thursday, amnesia by Friday.
Melinda did it.
She also stepped into primetime for a moment, starring alongside David McCallum in the short-lived series The Invisible Man (1975–76), playing the wife of the title character, Dr. Kate Westin. Short-lived shows are like ghost towns — built quickly, abandoned quickly, remembered only by the devoted few who happened to watch.
But Melinda kept working. That was the story of her career: steady, consistent, always present.
She guest-starred everywhere in the 1970s. Quincy, M.E. The Bionic Woman. CHiPs. Eight Is Enough. Dallas. Each one a different slice of American television, each one another role where she stepped in, did her job, and vanished again.
In 1984 she even served as a temporary replacement for Brenda Dickson as Jill Foster Abbott on The Young and the Restless. Imagine the pressure — stepping into a role beloved by viewers, trying to match someone else’s rhythm while the audience scrutinizes every breath. Soap opera fandom is not gentle.
Her film work was smaller, scattered like footnotes.
The Unkissed Bride in 1966. Fade to Black in 1980. And then, maybe her most widely recognized movie credit: A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge in 1985. Horror has a way of immortalizing actors in unexpected ways. One minute you’re working in daytime soap worlds, the next you’re part of the Freddy Krueger universe forever.
She popped up on shows like Lost in Space, Knight Rider, Beverly Hills, 90210. Even game shows like Match Game with Gene Rayburn — proof that television, in all its forms, was her ecosystem.
Melinda Fee was never a headline star.
She was a working actress. A professional. One of the faces that filled America’s screens for decades, familiar even when the name wasn’t.
That kind of career doesn’t come with fanfare, but it comes with endurance.
In the end, her life closed quietly. She suffered a massive stroke and died March 24, 2020, in the hospital. She requested that no funeral or memorial be held.
No ceremony. No spotlight.
Just an exit as understated as the way she lived: doing the work, playing the part, moving on.
Melinda Fee belonged to the long middle stretch of Hollywood — not the peaks of superstardom, not the tragedy of flameouts, but the steady hum of television life.
Daytime drama.
Primetime guest spots.
A career made of persistence.
Sometimes that’s the real story: not the legend, not the scandal — just the woman showing up, again and again, under the lights, until the lights finally go out.
