The 63-year-old actress was eight when she first played Cindy Brady on the TV sitcom created by Redwood Productions and Paramount Television for ABC, which ran from 1969 to 1974.
And when she was standing on the makeup chair in the Culver studio, “something from the catwalk” where the “lights and everything” are came crashing down and smacked her in the face.
Susan told her on-screen brothers Christopher Knight (Peter Brady) and Barry Williams (Greg Brady) on their ‘The Real Brady Bros’ podcast: “On the Culver lot, they were shooting something – I would assume, in the girl’s bedroom – and I was getting body makeup on my legs.
“[I] was standing on a makeup chair and something from the catwalk, where they keep all the lights and everything, fell.
“It hit the makeup man first, [bounced] off the body makeup woman, and hit me in the face.”
Describing her injuries – of which she recalls “loving” because it “looked like I was in a horror film” – Susan added: “My eyes were black. I mean, I had two black eyes. My nose was swollen. My face was swollen.
“I remember loving it because I looked like I was in a horror film.
“And then everybody knew, yes, I had got hurt, and I had got hurt very badly.”
Susan pointed out that her swollen face was evident in the episode where her on-screen mom Florence Henderson (Carol Brady) marries her show dad Robert Reed (Mike Brady), as well as in publicity shots for the show.
The former child star admitted: “You can tell if you look at the ceremony and you see the three girls on one side if you were to zoom in really tight, you can see my face is quite swollen.
“I look different. You can even see it in some of the early publicity shots. You can tell my face is a little swollen.”
Looking back at the incident – of which she wanted “to sob” because it hurt so much after Florence comforted her and the rest of the cast and crew telling her she was fine – she thinks the “saddest news” is that she “didn’t sue Paramount”.
Susan said: “The saddest news is that we didn’t sue Paramount, because I would have made more off of that than the show.
“But I came to work the next day.
“Florence was the first one to see me. She’s like, ‘You make sure everybody sees her.’ And my mom was like, ‘Oh, yes, I will.’ Because everybody was trying to say, ‘It didn’t really hit her. She’s fine.'”
