'70s scream queen, 81, dated Jon Voight and acted with Billy Crystal then wrote a Julia Roberts movie... can YOU guess who she is?

An actress who went from scream queen to sitcom star in the 1970s was glimpsed dashing around Los Angeles recently at the age of 81.

She was an early showbiz 'nepo baby,' the daughter of a communist screenwriter who fell prey to the Hollywood blacklist of the Red Scare but later mounted a roaring comeback that earned him two Oscars.

At the start of her career, she featured in one of her father's pictures and also worked for a director who later made enduring classics in both the horror and mafia genres.

Her greatest fame on-screen came from a sitcom she starred on from 1977 to 1981, one that served as the launchpad to stardom for the young Billy Crystal.

By the 1990s, she had traded in her life in front of the camera for a successful run as a screenwriter that included a box office juggernaut starring Julia Roberts.

Can you guess who she is?

She is none other than Jennifer Salt, who remains beloved by fans of classic TV for her turn on the sitcom Soap - a parody of soap operas - and who later co-wrote the screenplay for Julia Roberts' 2010 blockbuster Eat, Pray, Love.

The Daily Mail has contacted Salt's representative for comment. 

Created by Susan Harris, who later masterminded The Golden Girls, Soap featured Salt as the frosty, grasping Eunice Tate, one of the three children of the central family.

Billy Crystal landed his breakthrough role on the series as the mincing Jodie Dallas, one of the earliest gay characters on American TV.

The show developed a raunchy reputation that earned it an official condemnation from the Catholic Church, while gay groups expressed misgivings about Jodie's portrayal, particularly the early storyline of him considering a sex change.

Born in Los Angeles in 1944, Salt was the daughter of screenwriter Waldo Salt, who found himself blacklisted from Hollywood over his communist views.

'As far as the blacklisting is concerned, I didn't even understand it back then,' Salt recalled decades later to the blog Cult Film Freaks. 'I saw it as some kind of strange science fiction event like an episode of The Twilight Zone.'

After the blacklist dissolved, Salt enjoyed a triumphant return to the industry and won Oscars for writing Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home, both starring Jon Voight.

One of his daughter's early movie roles was in Midnight Cowboy in 1969 as Crazy Annie, the first love of the Voight character Joe Buck.

After Joe and Annie are gang raped, she gets institutionalized, while he moves to New York, falls in with a wheeler-dealer played by Dustin Hoffman and becomes a hustler.

Salt struck up a real-life romance with Voight during the shoot of the picture and remained with him for over a year before they went their separate ways.

Her career in the late 1960s and early 1970s was dominated by her work with Brian De Palma, who later directed Carrie and Scarface.

During that early period, she was living with her actress friend Margot Kidder, who struck up a romance with De Palma, according to author Peter Biskind's seminal history of New Hollywood entitled Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

Salt worked with De Palma on movies including The Wedding Party in 1969 - only the second credited film role by Robert De Niro - as well as Hi, Mom! in 1970, also with De Niro, and most famously the 1972 horror picture Sisters.

Margot Kidder played the titular dual role of two conjoined twins, whose brutal surgical separation sets the stage for a bizarre split personality plot.

Salt was cast the supporting role of a tough-as-nails news reporter who witnesses a murder that sets the plot of the cult classic in motion.

On the set of the movie, De Palma once advised Salt: 'Try being a total b**** here and see if that works,' to which she joked: 'Try holding off till I'm having my period then I'll be as big of a b**** as you want me to be.'

That same year, she proved her comic chops in Play It Again, Sam, starring Woody Allen and Diane Keaton and directed by Herb Ross from a play Allen had written.

Salt featured in the part of the Allen character's disastrous blind date Sharon - both his fantasy, a sizzling self-assured bombshell, and the reality, a mousy intellectual.

The peak of her screen stardom came with Soap, which ran from 1977 to 1981 and was canceled after four seasons under a cloud of suspicion that its envelope-pushing content was beginning to spook the sponsors.

From there, Salt's onscreen career fizzled, through she jobbed around with guest shots on shows like Magnum, PI; Murder, She Wrote and Family Ties.

After 1990, she retreated definitively behind the camera and devoted her energies a successful screenwriting career that included several episodes of the hit Ryan Murphy programs Nip/Tuck and American Horror Story.

Her biggest-ticket project was Eat, Pray, Love, starring Julia Roberts, Javier Bardem and James Franco in an adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's smash bestselling memoir of the post-divorce holiday she took through Italy, India and Bali.

Salt co-wrote the script with Murphy, who directed the movie to thunderous box office success and earned Roberts her mainstream comeback.

'As I got older,' Salt once shared: 'I really began to appreciate the work my father did when he was in his prime. I would watch the films he wrote the screenplays for, read the notations and changes he made in his scripts, and it became very interesting....'

She found writing to be 'easier than acting because I can create characters and situations any way I can dream them up, but as an actor you have to try and interpret a character someone else has created. It's much more difficult.' 

Writing, on the other hand, was 'truly exciting work,' she said, adding: 'I really do find it much more rewarding than I ever found acting to be.'

On the personal front, she was married from 1976 until 1980 to one David Greenberg, and their son Jonah Greenberg has also entered showbiz as a talent agent.