Catherine Bach on AllMovie

American actress Catherine Bach was born in Ohio, but spent most of her high school years in South Dakota with her father. As soon as she finished high school, Catherine flew to California to pursue the acting career she'd been dreaming about since seeing her actor uncle, Tony Verdugo, in a stage production. Supporting herself with various day jobs, Catherine took dancing lessons, made the audition rounds, and eventually attained a few TV bits and movie roles. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1973) was her most widely seen film role, principally because of what she didn't wear in it; but her best role was an all-too-brief appearance in The Midnight Man (1974), as Natalie Clayborne, the troubled college coed at the center of a mystery involving blackmail and murder.

In 1978 Bach was cast along with John Schneider and Tom Wopat as the "Dukes of Hazzard" in the weekly CBS TV series of the same name. The series was a comedy adventure about a hillbilly family, their souped-up automobile (The General Lee), and their corrupt antagonist, Boss Hogg. As Daisy Duke, Catherine spent most of her time in T-shirts and cutoffs, and thus the actress became a favorite of the young-college-boy set. Within a few months of Dukes of Hazzard's debut, the Catherine Bach poster was outselling the Farrah Fawcett and Suzanne Somers posters in quite a few cities. Catherine stayed with Dukes until its cancellation in 1985, even weathering the "siege of 1981," when her costars Schneider and Wopat left over contract differences and were briefly replaced by two lookalike actors. Like many 1970s TV stars, Catherine Bach found the movie offers, poster contracts, personal appearances and talk-show gigs slowly evaporating as her series faded from the public's memory.