Meet TNC's Star Anchor

Here's a news story that's been lost in the dusty corners of the internet for quite some time. Way back in 1999, IndustryCentral.net ran an interview with Barbara Niven, who played news anchor Barbara Miles in Wing Commanders 3 & 4. Ms. Niven is a working actress (and motivational speaker) and continues to star in numerous television shows/movies. As interesting as it is to read about this particular WC actor's story, it's also fun to find a website that appears to be stuck in the late '90s/early 2000s. IndustryCentral doesn't seem to have been touched much at all in the last decade, yet someone is still paying for the domain and account. It could go down at any moment, so if you're interested in checking the article out, visit quick here.

Barbara Niven is commited to acting classes and doing theater when she’s not on location shooting her current role on Pensacola: Wings of Gold. She loves taking risks, playing "out there" characters. "I never want to play it safe. I like being afraid… if something scares me, I’m going to say YES and then figure out how to do it." She has an independent film Anoosh of the Airways coming out where she plays eight different characters, and says it was freeing because there were no limits to where the characters could go. She’s also currently onstage in Los Angeles starring in a John Patrick Shanley play, Psychopathia Sexualis, playing an outrageous Texan named "Lucille" who stomps around the stage in a wedding dress and cowboy boots! She says, "I find that you can play anything outrageously… as long as you play it from an absolute core of truth. I learn something from every character I play, and carry part of them with me from that moment on." She says that Katherine Hepburn and Jessica Tandy are her idols. "You follow their careers and you watch the evolution of two human beings over the course of a lifetime. Age just made their work richer. It takes living to be a good actor. For me, it gets more exciting all the time. I can feel my instrument and my work getting better and better, and can’t wait to see where the journey takes me."

For now though she says she’s got one of the roles of a lifetime playing Kate on Pensacola, the owner of the local bar where all the fighter pilots hang out. Niven even studied with a local bartender when she got the part. He gave her lessons in bar tricks, which she paid for by washing bar glasses for him - lots of them. Dishpan hands were worth it. Although she says she still can’t flip those bottles around like the good ones do. She’s broken a few trying though!

You can also find all of the TNC Infobursts in the CIC Holovids section here. Only a few such news segments made it into the PC version of WC3, but more than a dozen more were included in the Playstation & 3DO editions.

Last, but not least, the site also covered Richard Riehle in 2000. You can find more on that piece here.