'Facts of Life' star Lisa Whelchel to speak at Henderson church

HENDERSON, Ky. - For folks who came of age during the 1980s, Blair Warner was a memorable television character.

Blair was one of the main characters on the sitcom “The Facts of Life,” about a girls private boarding school. She was rich, preppy and vain — self-absorbed with her looks and social privilege.

She was also, somehow, likable.

“The Facts of Life” was a successful program for NBC, with more than 200 episodes appearing during its run from 1979 to 1988. During both the 1981-82 and 1983-84 seasons, it was one of the 25 most-watched programs on television.

However shallow and spoiled the Blair character was, the actress who played her — Lisa Whelchel — was (and is) a person of considerable conviction. A devout Christian since age 10, Whelchel refused to act in an episode in which writers proposed that her character, by then a single young woman, would lose her virginity.

That episode, titled “The First Time,” marked the only time Whelchel didn’t appear in an episode of the show. Her decision reportedly cost her $55,000, her per-episode salary at the time.

She evidently never regretted her decision. As she has said in various interviews, she thought the loss of virginity before marriage was too complex a topic to be handled in a 22-minute sitcom. Besides, she felt that girls looked to her as a role model in terms of morality.

“I was a pretty solid Christian from the time I was little,” Welchel told The Gleaner. “So show business and anything else revolved around that. My Christianity and relationship with God were primary. It’s a stabilizer and the hub for anything else. My faith helped form every decision” about what roles to take and what roles to turn down.

Whelchel went on to leave showbiz to raise a family, and has since become an author, life coach and inspirational speaker before periodically returning to television.

On Sunday, April 28, she will be coming to Henderson. Whelchel will speak at 6 p.m. that day at Calvary Missionary Baptist Church at 2360 Green River Road as the guest of church member Bill Sullivan.

“He was just so genuine, and I figured if all the people in Henderson were like him then I wanted to meet them,” she said of Sullivan.

(Sullivan confessed to having had “a little bit” of a crush on Whelchel when she played a blonde beauty on “The Facts of Life,” but added: “She was a little young for me.”)

When she speaks here, Whelchel said her primary message will be about grace and how she experienced a focused lesson on this gift from God during a period of her life.

“Being in Hollywood is always to some degree harder as a Christian because there aren’t as many roles that are uplifting, and now there are fewer and fewer roles for me in Hollywood, but that also means there are more opportunities” in other directions, she said.

 “I have been a Christian since I was 10, and I’ve appreciated grounding my life in the Word of God. About 10 years ago, the Lord started taking me into another season where I learned to rest in His grace instead of trying to accomplish everything.”

Whelchel has had a remarkably diverse career before and after her “Facts of Life” years. Before the show began, the Texas native went to California and became a teen performer on Walt Disney’s “The New Mickey Mouse Club” in the 1970s.

While still on show, she recorded a Grammy-nominated album, “All Because of You,” that in 1984 reached No. 17 on the Billboard Contemporary Christian Music charts.

After the show ended, Whelchel married. She cites particular pleasure in becoming a stay-at-home mom, raising and homeschooling her three children. A highlight was piling her family into a big Tiffin Allegro RV and spending a year traveling the country to discover America.

In 2012, she returned to TV on the CBS show “Survivor: Phillipines,” enduring what has been called “her 39 excruciating days,” ultimately finishing tied for second place and winning the $100,000 “Player of the Season” prize, voted on by fans.

Along the way, she has authored more than a dozen books, is an inspirational speaker before audiences as large as 24,000, started MomTime Ministries groups across the nation, was one of the first bloggers (before “blog” was even a word) and was a “Personal Mom Coach” before coaching was cool.

She became an adventurer. Whelchel has traveled twice to India to partner with Rescue: Freedom, an organization committed to ending sex slavery for women and children. She embarked on an 11-day Vision Quest in the canyons of Utah, attended a 30-day silent retreat and walked 500 miles across Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

Back in show business, she appeared in the 2013 Tyler Perry movie “A Madea Christmas.” Whelchel co-hosted a talk show with “Survivor” host Jeff Probst and created and filmed a Hallmark Movie with her daughter, Clancy.

Presently, she hosts “Collector’s Call” on MeTV on Sundays at 9 p.m. The program takes Whelchel across the country to speak with some of the country’s biggest collectors of pop culture memorabilia.

“With Collector’s Call, I love learning and I love interesting people. And that program includes all of those things,” Whelchel said. Besides, “I enjoy meeting people and getting to know them, and as a life-long learner, it’s a way to learn about things that I wouldn’t normally come across.”

Whelchel’s appearance here on April 28 is open to the public. Sullivan is expecting a sizable crowd.

“I would like nothing better,” he said. “It would make her happy to have a packed house.”

Bill Sullivan has met multiple TV celebrities

Meeting Lisa Whelchel won’t mark the first time Bill Sullivan has rubbed elbows with celebrities.

He arranged to have Donna Douglas (famed for portraying Elly May Clampett on the sitcom “The Beverly Hillbillies” from 1962 to 1971) speak about her faith at Calvary Missionary Baptist Church in 2014. “It was packed!” Sullivan said of that crowd.

Not quite as well known was Kathy Garver, who portrayed a teenage niece on the TV show “Family Affair” in the late 1960s. Garver spoke at Calvary last year.

Has he met other celebrities? “You might say that,” Sullivan said.

At fan fests and nostalgia events over the years, he has met actresses Stefanie Powers (“The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.,” “Hart to Hart” and much more), Morgan Fairchild (“Falcon Crest” and numerous other TV shows and soap operas) and Dawn Wells (who played the wholesome beauty Mary Ann on “Gilligan’s Island”) and actors Robert Wagner (“Hart to Hart”) and Ed Begley Jr. (who has more than 300 acting credits on shows as diverse as “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” “Battlestar Gallactica” and “Arrested Development”), among others.

As that list suggests, Sullivan has a particular fondness for TV shows from his youth from the 1960s until about 1971. “After that, there were some shows that were pretty good,” he said, “but others were more bleh.”

He has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of shows from that era, none more so than the legal drama “Perry Mason.” Sullivan collaborated with author Ed Robertson to research and produce a book, “The Case of the Alliterative Attorney: Guide to the Perry Mason TV Series and TV Movies.”

For example, Sullivan will tell you, character actor Denver Pyle — perhaps best-remembered for his role as Briscoe Darling, the patriarch of the backwoods Darling family on “The Andy Griffith Show” — appeared on various episodes of “Perry Mason” as a defendant, a murder victim and a murderer. “He’s in an elite circle,” Sullivan said. “He was a murderer three times” during six appearances on “Perry Mason” from 1958 to 1966.

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