Sunshine

Sunshine (1973)

The tender story of a girl's determination to fill her life with sunshine... for as long as she lives

A young woman living in the woods with her husband, a struggling musician, and her young daughter, discovers she has terminal cancer. She begins to tape-record a journal of the time she has left so her daughter will know something of her when she grows up.

Date of release
1973-11-09
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (16)
Runtime
2h 1m
Genres
Drama, TV Movie
Director
Joseph Sargent

Casting

Interesting facts

Sunshine is a 1973 American made-for-television docudrama, directed by Joseph Sargent and produced by George Eckstein, about Kate Hayden, a young wife and mother who is diagnosed with cancer at age 20. The film stars Cristina Raines in the lead role of Kate, Cliff DeYoung as Kate's husband Sam Hayden, and twins Lindsay and Sidney Greenbush as Jill, Kate and Sam's daughter, as a toddler. It originally aired on CBS as an episode of the CBS Friday Night Movie on November 9, 1973. When first aired, Sunshine was the most watched made-for-TV film in history. The film uses John Denver's song "Sunshine on My Shoulders" as a theme.

Production

Sunshine was based on the life of Jacquelyn M. "Lyn" Helton (September 13, 1951 – November 7, 1971). In 1969, shortly after giving birth to her daughter Jennifer, the 18-year-old Helton was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer. Helton, along with her photographer/musician husband Tom Helton and her baby daughter, moved from Green River, Wyoming, to Denver, Colorado, to seek medical treatment.

Helton died on November 7, 1971, at the age of 20. After her death, numerous newspapers and magazines published excerpts from her journal. Lawrence Schiller, then a promoter, acquired the television and film rights to Helton's life story which became the basis for the film Sunshine and a short lived TV series.

Some critics also viewed Helton's story as having inspired a second made-for-TV movie, Message To My Daughter starring Bonnie Bedelia and Martin Sheen, which was first aired on December 12, 1973, on ABC. In Message, Janet Thatcher (Bedelia), the dying mother of a baby girl makes tape recordings of advice which her daughter Miranda (Kitty Winn) receives many years after Janet's death.

Parts of the film were shot on location in Vancouver, British Columbia with neighborhood scenes in Kitsilano and the West End, including footage of the Burrard and Granville Street Bridges and North Shore Mountains.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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