Reinvention Specialist – Juliette Watt – A Wild Life Well Lived #2BB 086

You are going to love this show because our guest, Juliette Watt, reinvention specialist,  has done incredible things in her life and is a hoot to listen to. Her website is www.actthreeproductions.com.

Coming to you this time from the Winnemucca Y

Juliette is originally from London, England. She’s been a Playboy Bunny, cabaret singer, Emmy-nominated script writer and Writer’s Guild Award winner for soap operas, airplane pilot, and animal rescuer.  Her soap operas included “One Life to Live” and “Loving.”

In the late 60’s, she worked as a Playboy Bunny/dealer in London at of the club’s casinos. Later, she toured as a cabaret singer for Playboy in America. “It was wild!” Of course, we wanted to know more.

Playboy Bunny

Her roommate was Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend at the time and they both hung out at the Playboy mansion almost every day. “It was fascinating to watch very famous people just doing nothing.” They weren’t trying to impress anyone and were able to be themselves. Some were even boring. Hefner was and still is smart and created a wonderful atmosphere for everyone who visited. It gave Juliette the opportunity to meet and learn from extraordinary people.

They included Robin Williams, Gregory Peck, Peter Lawford with whom she had incredible conversations.  (Listen in to hear her stories about Robin)

Reinvention as a Screenwriter

In the 90’s she moved from LA to NYC. Her husband at the time was a Broadway actor. Cabaret was becoming a dying art form so she decided she wanted to be a writer.  She originally planned to write serious plays but her marriage suddenly ended and she had to find a way to support herself fast.  She took some of the plays she had written to ABC TV because they were recruiting writers for soaps. It took a year for her work to get approved. She finally got hired to write on “One Life to Live.” Her boss, who was a woman,  had just come from producing “Dirty Dancing” and turned “One Life to Live” into an award-winning show.

They were first to do a story about AIDS and the AIDS quilt, which won an Emmy. They were also first to do a gay storyline and to switch a black and white couple.  Shows, up to that point, were allowed to show a black woman with a white man, but you never saw a black man with a white woman.

As a scriptwriter, Juliette would write 92 pages, edited, and delivered to the actors in four days- every single week – 52 weeks a year. Over 4 years, she wrote over 750 scripts.  (Listen in to hear more of Juliette’s hilarious soap opera stories)

Then, she became an airplane pilot

She became licensed as a fixed wing pilot in 1995 and is now licensed to fly 19 types of airplanes, with the exception of jets. She also worked as a flight instructor.

She left NYC right after 911 and moved to Utah to work for Best Friends Animal Sanctuary and spent a dozen or so years doing animal rescue. During that time, she flew approximately 300 dogs, cats, rabbits, parrots, and birds, to new homes and rescue facilities.  After Hurricane Katrina, she flew all over the disaster area rescuing animals from the flooding.

On Becoming a Reinvention Specialist

Her reinventions have been extreme, but Juliette says, “If you apply yourself to something tremendously difficult, it keeps you young. When your brain is in the high gear of learning, you can’t do anything better for yourself.”

“We are blessed to live in a country that lets us reinvent ourselves after the age of 40 because in other countries (like Europe) it’s much harder.”  There isn’t the type of class structure in the U.S. that prevents it.  (Listen in as she explains why this is and how she grew up)

Her goal is to start a speaking career and also a reinvention mentorship program,