Sheila Kuehl
Kuehl was born Sheila Ann Kuehl in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her father, Arthur, was an airplane construction worker at Douglas Aircraft. He was Catholic and her mother, Lillian, was Jewish. As a child actress she performed under the stage name Sheila James.
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
After the third season of "Dobie Gillis", Rod Amateau and Max Shulman produced a pilot for a "Zelda" spinoff starring Sheila James as Zelda Gilroy, with Joe Flynn and Jean Byron cast as her parents. However, CBS president James Aubrey lingered over moving forward with the "Zelda" series for a long time before firmly rejecting the series, with Amateau telling James in private that Aubrey had found "Zelda" (and by extension James, then a closeted lesbian) "too butch". James' contract for the pilot and the resulting waiting period caused her to be absent from much of the fourth and final season of "Dobie Gillis", though Amateau was able to hire her to return as Zelda for four episodes towards the end of the season. Acting roles became sparse for James by the late 1960s; she went into law and politics under her birth name of Sheila Kuehl and later became the first openly gay person elected to the California State Legislature.