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Lona Williams
Television producer, writer and actress From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Lona Williams (born September 26, 1966) is an American television producer, writer, and actress.
Early life and education
Williams was raised in Rosemount, Minnesota,[2][3][4] where her father, Les, was a middle school math teacher.[citation needed] Williams participated in a number of beauty pageants as a child and was crowned Minnesota's Junior Miss in 1985,[5] before becoming the runner up in the year's America's Junior Miss, winning a $10,000 scholarship.[6][2][5] She graduated from Rosemount High School shortly thereafter.[citation needed]
Williams attended the University of Minnesota and after she took a screen-writing course there, her teacher encouraged her to move to California to find work.
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Career
After working as an assistant on one show, Jerry Belson at The Tracey Ullman Show, helped her get a job as a writing assistant on The Simpsons.[2] She occasionally provided voices for the show, including that of Amber Dempsey, a single-episode character from "Lisa the Beauty Queen".[7] She noted: "I really was only a typist for the show. But by working on the script, I learned how the scripts were put together. I would go to work and type all day, and come home and work on my spec scripts for The Simpsons and Roseanne."[2]
Bruce Helford hired Williams as a writer on the short-lived Someone Like Me before in 1995 signing her up as a writer and producer on The Drew Carey Show. She stayed for three seasons and wrote the screenplay Dairy Queens which was retitled and released in 1999 as Drop Dead Gorgeous.[2][8] She also wrote the original script for the 2001 film Sugar & Spice (on which she is credited under the pseudonym Mandy Nelson).[9][10] She co-wrote the script of Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse.
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Filmography
Writing
Film
Television
References
External links
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