The then 33-year-old, who replaced Patricia Neal as Olivia following the 1971 TV movie The Homecoming: A Christmas Story, begrudgingly auditioned for the role. "I didn’t want to do it. But I was going through a divorce, and I had three kids to support," Michael told Fox News. 

"I wasn’t drawn to it at all! I had finished doing 'Private Lives,' which Francis Coppola directed, and I played Cleopatra that same season at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. I wasn’t ready to play a 40-year-old farmer’s wife," she shared. "Of course in retrospect, it was a gift from God. It saved my life."