![]() I didn’t have time to go to the bathroom. They’d print it, and we’d move on, and I’d be like ‘But I really flubbed that second line.’ It would be ‘Moving on!’ I didn’t really know how to ask for another take, because in theater you just push through no matter what. The Shapiros, she remembers, rarely if ever visited the set, Out of the gate, Emerald Point felt like an orphan. You wouldn’t be there if you weren’t good.” And because I was so green, it took me six months to understand the priorities: There’s so much money on the line. The money was nice, but the truth is, I had come from a theater background where there’s a commitment to make it good. “None of it felt like the big time to me. They were odd birds, those 1980s primetime soap operas.Īccording to Dunnam, the casts of Falcon Crest and Knots Landing, both on the same network as Emerald Point, were fond of sharing a joke about their shows’ writing: “If I say the lines twice as fast,” the actors would say, “they only hurt half as long.” Says Dunnam: “I thought that was the absolute best solution for getting through these scripts. Unlike Dynasty or The Colbys, the Shapiros’ other programs, it never really found an audience. I had my 24 th birthday on set.”Įmerald Point ran for 22 episodes, just one season. ![]() She pushed me through, past the naysayers, and the next thing I knew I was doing the pilot with Dennis. But Esther Shapiro was my champion, because my dad was really Navy. “What I gathered later was that nobody wanted me. It’s not like anybody extends a warm hand. “When it gets to these stakes, there’s like 45 people in the room, and they’re all looking at you like you’re some kind of specimen,” she recalls. Initially, she’d been up against 200 other similarly red-headed hopefuls. But nothing prepared her for the final round of Emerald Point tryouts. She’d been invited to audition in Los Angeles before. During her senior year of high school in Texas, and in the years afterwards, she immersed herself in theater. “I got to play Honey in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ when I was 14,” she says. On Emerald Point, NAS, a prime-time drama cooked up by Dynasty creators Eleanor and Richard Shapiro, she starred as Kay Mallory, the lovelorn middle daughter of a career Navy man, played by Dennis Weaver.īased in Dallas, Dunnam was herself part of a military family, and had been indoctrinated into community theater during visits to her father (weapons officer on the USS Midway) on an American air base in Japan.īecause she was tall and … well-developed, Stephanie was often cast in adult roles. ![]() Hers was a hard-earned career.ĭuring the 1983-84 television season, Dunnam was just another ingenue thrust into the works of an insatiable talent-eating machine. ![]() It’s a part that Stephanie Dunnam has earned the right to play. No less than Katherine Hepburn played her in the 1968 film version, winning an Academy Award for her efforts. The role of tart-tongued Eleanor in The Lion in Winter, opening Saturday, is a plum for any serious dramatic actress of a certain age. She has been onstage in just about every one of America’s major theatrical centers. Fame can be both fickle and fleeting, as actress Stephanie Dunnam knows well.ĭunnam, who’s playing the 12 th Century British queen Eleanor of Aquitaine in freeFall Theatre’s production of The Lion in Winter, has an impressive, 25-year resume of regional and national stagework, including extensive tours of hit dramas that had just come off Broadway. ![]()
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