Actress/singer Pia Zadora (Butterfly) will swap homes with Oscar winner Cloris Leachman (The Last Picture Show, The Mary Tyler Show, Young Frankenstein) on Celebrity Wife Swap. There have been many odd swaps before on the show, but this is one of the strangest. Zadora, 62, resides in Vegas with her third husband and youngest son, 18-year-old Jordan. She still sings at Piero’s on the Strip. Leachman is 89 and gets around mostly by wheelchair (due to a sprained ankle).
[What Pia Zadora Learned From Frank Sinatra]
Cloris Leachman won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in The Last Picture Show. She’s also won eight Primetime Emmy Awards, more than any other performer. In the 1940s, as Miss Chicago, Leachman competed in the 2oth Miss America pageant (she placed in the Top 16). And then she landed the role of a lifetime as Phyllis, the manipulative landlady on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. She got a spinoff, too, Phyllis. She became a favorite of filmmaker Mel Brooks – her most memorable role being the mustachioed Frau Blucher in Young Frankenstein. More recently, she played Lois’s mother Ida Gorski on Malcolm in the Middle. Leachman was married once, from 1953 to 1979, to director George Englund (The Ugly American). They had five children. Cloris now lives with daughter Dinah, Dinah’s husband Tom and their 10-year-old daughter Hallelujah in Topanga, California. Located in the Santa Monica Mountains, it’s a nature lover’s haven. Don’t expect the well pampered Zadora to adapt well. Celebrity Wife Swap airs Wednesdays at 10pm on ABC.
