After three years of marriage Robert Culp (I SPY) and France Nuyen (South Pacific) were at their preliminary divorce proceedings. Culp said, “Miss Nuyen had quietly kept track of all my mistakes and rattled them off to our lawyers. She ended the list with: ‘And for our first date, he was an hour late’.”
On the set of I SPY, where they first met, Culp had invited Nuyen to join him on the beach at 10am the next day. He was on time, but Nuyen wasn’t aware that it had just turned to daylight savings time, so she arrived an hour early. She didn’t say anything when she thought Culp was an hour late and didn’t apologize to her. She waited until the divorce to bring it up.
35 years later, on the commentary of his I SPY DVDs, Culp was very complimentary about Nuyen’s beauty and professionalism. Here’s a wild example:
Culp and Nuyen had to film an I SPY scene in England. They flew to London and stayed overnight at a five-star hotel, planning to fly the next morning to location.
They ordered tuna sandwiches from room service. While eating them, Culp told Nuyen about how he got food poisoning two years before at this same hotel, eating a tuna sandwich.
Two hours later, he and Nuyen got food poisoning “from that same damned jar of mayonnaise” Culp recounted.
Culp said: “If we had been the entitled actors of today, we would have called in sick. But since our I SPY producer, Sheldon Leonard, was financing the show out of his own pocket, Miss Nuyen and I decided to fly the one-hour to the filming location no matter what. Her usually flawless face was discolored with pain.
"Even my hair hurt as we boarded the plane nauseous. We made it to location and filmed the scene running to the restrooms between takes. Miss Nuyen had to run into my arms with a happy smile as we are reunited in the story. She managed to make it completely believable while being terribly sick.”
Nuyen appeared in four episodes of I SPY. She had first met Culp on the first episode she did. She got so furious with him at that time for suggesting acting techniques, that she refused to film the next scene. It took an hour of coaxing from the director to get her out to the set.
Culp said: “When she finally came out of her dressing room, I overheard her tell the director, ‘Okay. I’ll do the scene. But keep that son-of-a-bitch Culp away from me.'
"If there was an Olympic event for irony," Culp said years later, "Miss Nuyen would take the gold.”
I know from experience. My Ms. Nguyen is very professional. But we are opposite in many ways. Fortunately, we will never divorce, even though she knows in great detail every time I have made a mistake in all the 28 years we've been together, because we haven't married yet. A smart move that Robert Culp and France Nuyen didn't do. ;-)
Ron