[1] Having co-starred in a staging of Madge Miller's Land of the Dragon, she was seen in Blue Denim, James Leo Herlihy's play about teen pregnancy, by Solly Baiano, the head of Warner Bros. talent department.

[citation needed] Her TV acting debut came on May 4, 1960, a little over two months after the contract signing, in the episode "Shadow of the Blade", broadcast near the end of the first season of the detective series Hawaiian Eye, which gave her top billing among the guest cast.

[7] On October 14, she was seen in "The Wide Screen Caper" episode of 77 Sunset Strip, playing an up-and-coming starlet named Sprite Simpson, and a month later, portrayed Native American girl Chantay", the title character in the November 13 segment of the western series Lawman.

At about the same time, a brief news item publicized that "[S]ixteen-year-old Sharon Hugueny who makes her film debut with Troy Donahue in Warners' "Parrish," has already written her autobiography—a by-line piece which will be published in the January issue of the General Motors Corporation magazine.

Her first series episode, "A Touch of Velvet", was broadcast January 11, in the middle of Hawaiian Eye's second season, as she portrayed blind girl Ellie Collins, who helps one of the show's detectives catch a killer, exonerating a suspect whom she marries at the end.

[9] In his 1994 autobiography The Kid Stays in the Picture, then actor and future producer Robert Evans describes how he met Hugueny on the set of Parrish where "she was Warner Brothers' entry as the next Elizabeth Taylor".

[1] Back in Hollywood shortly before her 18th birthday, Hugueny was photographed attending Bob Ender's twist party with Richard Chamberlain, but found that leaving for New York and putting her contract with Warner Bros. on hold, had damaged her career prospects.

A prominent supporting role in the two-hour, 36-minute Technicolor film version of Leonard Spigelgass' hit Broadway comedy-drama, A Majority of One, which she had been completing at the time of her departure, was edited to little more than a cameo, with eighth billing in the cast list.

Two months later, her third appearance on Hawaiian Eye, in the episode "Rx Cricket", which focused on Connie Stevens' title character, left Hugueny competing for attention among a number of other guest stars.

Now at liberty, she received two additional job offers that year, a guest shot on the "Operation Arrivederci" episode of Ensign O'Toole, which spotlighted her as an Italian girl attracted to the title character (played by Dean Jones),[14] and a heavily dramatic part as a mental patient in the independently produced The Caretakers, released on August 21, 1963.

In an interview conducted over 40 years later, supporting actor Van Williams recalled[15] the troubled production, produced, directed and co-written by Hall Bartlett and starring Jeffrey Hunter as a progressive doctor at a psychiatric clinic.

Producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr., in his sole outing as a director, conducted a seven-month search to find the appropriate young lead opposite Fonda, with the proviso that in addition to having "training and dedication", she must be "an actress, not a starlet".

[16] The highly dramatic story of two unmarried college students, Eddie and Pam, faced with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy provided numerous opportunities for heated confrontations and provocative (for 1964) contemplation of abortion.