Lona Williams
Williams in 1992
Born	1962 United States
Occupation	Producer, writer, actress
Years active	1991-2002

Lona Willams (born 1962) is an American television producer, writer and actress.

Williams was raised in Rosemount, Minnesota,^[1] where her father, Les, was a middle school math teacher.^{[citation needed]} Williams participated in a number of beauty pageants as a child and was crowned Minnesota's Junior Miss in 1985,^{[citation needed]} before becoming the runner up in the year's America's Junior Miss, winning a $10,000 scholarship.^[1][2] She graduated from Rosemount High School shortly thereafter.^{[citation needed]}

Williams attended the University of Minnesota and after taking a screen-writing course there, her teacher encouraged her to move to California to find work. After working as an assistant on one show, Jerry Belson helped her get a job as a writing assistant on The Simpsons.^[1] She occasionally provided voices for the show, including that of Amber Dempsey, a single-episode character from "Lisa the Beauty Queen".^[3] She noted: "I really was only a typist for the show. But by working on the script, I learned how the scripts were put together. I would go to work and type all day, and come home and work on my spec scripts for The Simpsons and Roseanne."^[1]

Bruce Helford hired Williams as a writer on the short-lived Someone Like Me before in 1995 signing her up as a writer and producer on The Drew Carey Show. She stayed for three seasons and wrote the screenplay Dairy Queens which was retitled and released in 1999 as Drop Dead Gorgeous.^[1][4] She also wrote the original script for the 2001 film Sugar & Spice.^[5]

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Lona Williams at the Internet Movie Database