Scream Queen Jennifer Salt, 81, Looks Unrecognizable During Rare Outing Decades After Skyrocketing to Fame in 1970s

Former 1970s horror movie queen Jennifer Salt was spotted out in Los Angeles, more than three and a half decades after she retired from acting, RadarOnline.com can reveal.

Salt, 81, transitioned away from on-screen work in 1990 to a successful career in writing and producing, and appeared to be thriving during an outing with a young girl in the California sunshine.

Salt gained Hollywood fame in the 1972 psychological horror flick Sisters, starring opposite Superman's Margot Kidder and directed by Brian DePalma, whom she briefly dated while they were in college.

Prior to that, she appeared in a small role in the 1969 Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman classic Midnight Cowboy. Salt appeared in flashbacks as "Crazy Annie," the Texas hometown lover of Voight's Joe Buck. Her father, Waldo Salt, wrote the film's screenplay, and it turned out she would later follow in his footsteps.

Salt's other impressive film included a role in the Woody Allen and Diane Keaton-led Play It Again, Sam in 1972, before she transitioned away from movies to television.

On the small screen, Salt appeared in episodes of The Love Boat, Family, Love American Style, Magnum P.I., Murder, She Wrote, and Family Ties during the 1970s and 1980s.

The Los Angeles native's most enduring part was in the ABC comedy Soap, where she starred as Eunice Tate in 65 episodes spanning from 1977 through 1981. The show also launched the career of Billy Crystal, who went on to become a beloved Hollywood star.

After a six-episode stint on the ABC sitcom The Marshall Chronicles in 1990, Salt retired from acting, trading life in front of the camera for a career behind the scenes.

She tried her hand at a career in interior design and considered moving to Montana and abandoning Hollywood altogether, but Salt was urged to join a writers' workshop by her actress pal, Jill Clayburgh

"It was terrifying. But I wanted more than anything in the world to get out of acting, and so I plugged away at a corny screenplay for two years," she confided to The New York Times in 2010.

"Mostly I decided to try writing because I didn’t have to be young and beautiful and thin to do it," Salt admitted. "But I was utterly shocked at how fun it was once I got started. I loved that I was in charge of my own intelligence."

Salt got her big break with a staff-writing job on FX's dark plastic-surgeon drama Nip/Tuck, where she began working closely with the show's creator, future TV titan Ryan Murphy.

"She sees the world in such a brilliant, sophisticated way I had to have her," the six-time Emmy winner raved about why he hired Salt for the show.

“Jennifer has this way of being able to get to the true motivations of people. She’ll say: ‘Wait a minute. Why is that character doing what she’s doing?’ That is an incredible talent, and I think it comes partly from the fact that Jennifer has had so many incarnations," Murphy gushed to the Times.

Salt went on to pen the screenplay for the 2010 Julia Roberts vehicle Eat Pray Love, based on Elizabeth Gilbert's bestselling memoir.

She's also kept in close working contact with Murphy, serving as a writer on his 2020 series Ratched as well as various seasons of American Horror Story, both of which she also held executive producer credits for.