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Alan Autry's daughter briefly appeared once on In the Heat of the Night
Blink and you’ll miss the father-daughter moment in an episode fittingly called "Every Man’s Family."
"Hey mister, can we have our frisbee back?" a young blonde girl calls out to Bubba Skinner in a 1993 In the Heat of the Night episode called "Every Man’s Family."
Look closely at this young girl and you might just see a resemblance to Bubba, because she is the real-life daughter of Bubba actor Alan Autry.
Autry was a former Green Bay Packer quarterback-turned-actor who got his start in TV and movies in 1978.
By the time he joined the cast of In the Heat of the Night, he'd featured in bit roles in movies like Popeye and Brewster's Millions and TV shows like Cheers, The Dukes of Hazzard and Newhart.
But In the Heat of the Night represented his biggest break yet, and the role came in 1988, two years after Autry had divorced his first wife Vicki Brown, with whom he had one daughter named Lauren.
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It’s Lauren who appears with her dad in "Every Man's Family," which became her first onscreen appearance.
Later when In the Heat of the Night was still on air, Autry remarried and with his new wife Kimberlee, his family grew by two more kids, Heather and Austin.
Like Lauren, Autry got Heather and Austin bit roles on his TV projects, but Lauren would be the only one of his kids to appear on dad's hit crime drama.
His daughter Heather's sole onscreen appearance came on an episode of Grace Under Fire when Autry played a recurring character Rick Bradshaw, one of Grace's love interests.
In 2002, Autry gathered his wife Kimberlee, along with Austin and Lauren, and made his directorial debut, casting them all in the TV movie The Legend of Jake Kincaid.
Then in 2011, when Autry followed that up with another Jake Kincaid movie called Forgiven, Kimberlee and Lauren returned to appear in that one, too.
Likely keeping his family in his projects was Autry's way of spending more time with his wife and kids.
This conflicts only somewhat with the non-family man image of Bubba Skinner, who is known as a ladies man on In the Heat of the Night. Now you know the truth is Autry put his kids in as many of his projects as he could, including a special appearance by his first daughter in his biggest hit show.
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