Grease Star Didi Conn Felt Like a ‘Clown’ in Frenchy’s Pink Hair (Exclusive)

Frenchy’s pink hair is iconic now, but Didi Conn did not feel that way at the time. 

“Nobody had pink hair,” Conn, who played beleaguered Pink Lady Frenchy in 1978’s Grease, tells PEOPLE. “Nobody. I mean, nobody. You’d look like a clown.”

In Grease, Frenchy drops out of Rydell High and goes to beauty school. But she messes up in her tinting class and drops out of beauty school, too — after she dyes her hair pink. She decides to go back to high school after a musical sequence where legendary teen idol Frankie Avalon as the “Teen Angel” sings her “Beauty School Dropout.”

Conn, 73, says she had to test with different pink wigs, but she didn’t know about the full costume — the pink wig and peach smock dress that reads “La Coiffure” — until she got dressed that morning. “And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I look so crazy. What am I going to do?’ ” she remembers.

Conn had gone over all her lines with her acting coach, a “very funny guy” who had worked in Vaudeville. She was so worried, she remembers, that she snuck off the lot and drove to his house in Beverly Hills to show him what she looked like. “Let me tell you, the looks I got with this pink hair,” she says. 

As for her coach, “He looked at me, he says, ‘Oh, my God.’ He says, ‘Forget everything we talked about. Just don’t do a thing. Just don’t do it.’ And that was great direction because just having Frankie Avalon singing to me and just drooling was enough.”

Only after filming the movie and feeling embarrassed about the pink, Conn says, “Punk came in, and now you see people with pink hair all the time. And blue and green and rainbow. That’s funny to me. I wonder if they know who was the first?”

When Conn originally auditioned to play Frenchy in the movie, which was based on the already successful Broadway musical, she had to go to the Paramount lot to get the script from the security guard. “They give me a skinny little envelope. And I said, ‘Wait a minute,’ ” she says. “I opened it up and it was like one page. It was, ‘Men are rats. Worse than that they’re fleas on rats.’ ” 

“Well, I didn’t know why she’s saying that, who she was, anything,” she says. So she asked the security guard if any of the thicker envelopes on this desk happened to be the full script, so she could have enough context to nail her audition. He let her sit under his desk and she read up to that scene. 

Then, in a moment of kismet, on her way home, Conn noticed a salon called Frenchy’s Beauty Parlor. She made an appointment for the day of her audition, but didn’t say she was an actor because she wanted to hear about beauty school. She realized the drive she had to be an actor and the drive her stylist had to do hair was “the same thing.”

“She loved hair, and she said that every doll, her sister’s dolls, she cut all their hair and it was just great,” Conn says. After she landed the role, she even went to beauty school for a couple of days to see what it was really like.

Conn has continued to work over the years, including starring in the kids’ Thomas the Tank Engine series Shining Time Station. This year, she also appeared in two episodes of Overcompensating on Amazon.

“I have these wonderful new agents, and they were sending me weirdo things that I’m totally not right for,” she says about her memorable appearance. “And they said, ‘Just do it anyway, because you haven’t done in a while and now you want to work these casting people have to see you.’ All right. So I get this, and it says, ‘Old Lady, and she curses a lot.’ And I thought to myself, ‘They’re going to get a little white-haired grandma and to hear that come out of her, it’s going to be hilarious.’ ”

She told her agents she wouldn’t even bother. “They said, ‘You’re not getting out of this one. It’s called Overcompensating. You’re overcompensating. You can do it.’ And I thought to myself, ‘That’s true. I am overcompensating.’ So I did it.”

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“The script was so funny,” she adds, calling the show’s creator and star Benito Skinner “terrific” and “sweet as hell.” 

Forty-seven years after it was released, fans still clamor for all things Grease. “I feel blessed,” Conn says about being part of the movie. “I feel, ‘Boy, how lucky was I?’ That was just a wonderful experience. We all had fun, but who knew?”