Linda Melson Harrison (born July 26, 1945) is an American television and film actress, and director and producer, who is internationally known for her role as Nova in the science fiction film classic Planet of the Apes (1968) and the first sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes; she also had a cameo in Tim Burton's 2001 remake of the original. She was a regular cast member of the 1969–70 NBC television series Bracken's World. She was the second wife of film producer Richard D. Zanuck (Jaws, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory); her youngest son is producer Dean Zanuck (Road to Perdition, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory).
Linda Melson Harrison was born in Berlin, Maryland. She was the third of five daughters of Isaac Burbage Harrison, a nurseryman, and his wife, Ida Virginia Melson, a beautician. She was the middle child, with two older sisters, Kay and Gloria, and two younger sisters, Jane and Joan. The Harrisons, like Linda's maternal Melson ancestors, had a long history in the Delmarva region. According to Ancestry.com, the Melson family were mid-17th century immigrants to Maryland from Melsonby St James in North Yorkshire. The Anglo-Welsh Harrisons had been resident for generations in West Kirby, Cheshire, when one Richard Harrison, son of another Richard Harrison, emigrated in the early 17th century from West Kirby to the New Haven Colony in what is now Connecticut, thence to Maryland. Richard's direct descendant, Harrison's paternal grandfather, Joseph G. Harrison, and Joseph's older brother, Orlando Harrison (Mayor of Berlin 1900–1910 and 1916–1918 and Maryland State Senator for Worcester County, 1916-1928), established J.G. Harrison & Sons Nurseries, which were, at one time, the largest fruit tree nursery business in America, employing some five hundred workers. The former Harrison Laboratory at the University of Maryland, College Park campus, which Harrison attended briefly, was named for her paternal great-uncle, Senator Orlando Harrison.
"I knew she'd be a star when she was only five," Ida Harrison told an interviewer in 1969. Mrs Harrison, who described her middle daughter as "a little ham", enrolled her in ballet and acrobatics classes at age five. By age six, Harrison was performing on stage, and liking it. She attended Berlin's Buckingham Elementary School, which her mother and all her sisters attended. In 1956, when she was eleven, Harrison's acrobatic performance earned her first prize in the Delmarva Chicken Festival Talent Contest. Six years later, at the same festival, Harrison won the "Miss Delmarva" beauty contest. By the time she entered Berlin's Stephen Decatur High School, Harrison had become a skilled acrobatic dancer. Harrison also dreamed of becoming an actress and a star.

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