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Space: 1999 Seventeen

Spotlight

Martin Landau and Barbara Bain are off and running in Space: 1999

Last seen matching wits with assorted villains in entertaining (if wildly improbable) adventures on Mission: Impossible, Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, husband and wife, are TV costars again. the midst of their first sortie on Space: 1999 a surprise hit of the season, they are hurtling through the universe on a piece of the moon, a remnant of a nuclear explosion. Martin is cast as the intrepid commander of Moon Base Alpha; Barbara is the head medic for some three hundred earthlings who constitute the colony

By the time the initial two dozen chapters of the new series conclude this spring, the team will have already plunged into outer space for a second season, beguiling their fans with spectacular special effects. "Science fiction is a literary form," says Martin, who's tan, sleek and articulate. "A good writer can create a world in three paragraphs, then the reader's mind can do anything with it. The danger is to disappoint in the visualization. But we've created a world different from anything seen before on TV. Within five years, we're going to run through every variation there is. Like Star Trek, we come into contact with mind-boggling incredibilities, but that show was two thousand years into the future with everyone running around in a ship that could do all kinds of things. We're victims, something like pioneers: more identifiable as people."

Barbara is a composed looking actress whose face is cast in the mold of the fashion model she once was. She and Martin, who spent their honeymoon on tour in the road company of a Broadway play, have worked most of their professional lives in television. "What is fully satisfying to an actor," he says, "is playing Shakespeare three months a year. A little Chekhov and Shaw. A film here and there. I'm a leading man on TV, a character actor in films."

Barbara has never done a feature film. "I'm a television baby," she remarks. They have appeared together onstage in California and in TV variety shows. But they joke, "We're not the Smothers brothers. We got married because we like to be with each other, but apart from the three years on Mission: Impossible, the bulk of our work has been separate."

Martin was born in New York the son of a machinist, and grew up in Brooklyn. After attending art school, he worked as a staff artist on a newspaper. "I grew up with comic strips, so I became a cartoonist," he explains. He gave in to a yearning for the stage, worked off-Broadway and in summer stock, acting, directing, coaching, - when he first met Barbara - before ending up in Hollywood.

Barbara hails from Chicago. She was a quiet girl, a greedy reader. "I was everybody in every book I ever read,' she recalls. "I lived a very strong fantasy life." Her father was in the grocery business, her mother was interested in ecology. Barbara thought she was going to be a sociologist. She remembers that "fantastic, marvellous feeling when you're very young, when you feel so strong, able to save the world; then noticed that I couldn't do it!" She came to New York, modelled, studied drama. "I never thought of myself as an actress" she muses. "But when walked onstage for the first time, I loved it, for some totally inexplicable reason, I felt like I had come home."