[3] Smithers first reached the public eye as a teenager when, at 16, she was profiled and featured on the March 21, 1966 cover of Newsweek seated on the back of a motorcycle.
[6] Smithers, in her early 20s, won a role in the 1974 feature film, Where the Lilies Bloom, about a household of children surviving in the Appalachian Mountains.
In 1978 she got her biggest break, landing a role on the situation comedy, WKRP in Cincinnati playing Bailey Quarters.
From 1986 to 1995, she was married to actor James Brolin[3] and was stepmother to his two children from a previous marriage; together they have one daughter, Molly Elizabeth.
[5] In June 2014, Smithers attended a reunion of surviving WKRP in Cincinnati cast members hosted by the Paley Center for Media.