TV Guide – Cable Edition
April 2-8, 1994
by Joe Rhodes
Townsend, Tenn., is not exactly the kind of place Kellie Martin had in mind when she thought about moving away from home for the first time in her life. She is, after all, a Southern California kid, a Hollywood teenager used to malls and sunshine and Chinese chicken salad with dressing on the side. And when Martin dreamed of places she wanted to live, she thought about Paris and New York. She thought about sidewalk cafes and museums, about lights and excitement and crowded boulevards. She did not think of fog-draped mountains, moonlit rivers, or walking in solitude down long, lonesome roads.
Nevertheless, Townsend, Tenn., is where Martin—best known as Becca on ABC’s Life Goes On—set up housekeeping in the fall for the location shoot of CBS’s new hour-long dramatic series Christy. Based on Catherine Marshall’s bestseller, Christy stars Martin as a pampered city girl forced to fend for herself when she becomes a teacher at a remote Appalachian mission school in 1912. Tyne Daly and Tess Harper costar.
“When I heard I was going to this rural town with only 500 people,” says Martin, “my first thought was, ‘They’ll just be a bunch of hicks I won’t be able to talk to.’ I really couldn’t imagine living in a place like that.”
It wasn’t just that Martin, 18, would be spending three months away from the familiar warmth of Los Angeles. She would also be working as an adult for the first time, which meant 15-hour days on the set, not to mention doing her own laundry and cooking. “I’d lived at home my whole life,” she says, curled up on a couch in the earthquake-cracked Studio City condominium she shares with her mother and younger sister. “I never even went to summer camp.”
Leaving Los Angeles was like leaving a cocoon. There had been, Martin says, a certain comfort about growing up in front of the cameras on Life Goes On. Her high school education had been one-on-one, from a tutor on the set. She had passed the tests of adolescence—the first kiss, the first driver’s license, the decision to go away to college—on television before she experienced them in real life. In some ways, Becca was more than a character for Martin—she was an alter ego—and saying goodbye proved easier said than done. Even before Life Goes On ended its four-year run last spring, Martin had been accepted at Yale University and planned to begin classes that fall. “But,” she says, “I wasn’t ready yet.”
Martin decided to put off school for a year, and although she did a guest appearance on NBC’s Seaquest DSV, she was not looking for another long-term acting commitment—until she saw the script for Christy.
“If I’d gone away to college right after Life Goes On, I’d have left as a child. But Christy gave me a chance to play a young woman. It was the perfect next step.” So Martin went to Townsend, where she learned to bake potatoes, steam vegetables, and wash a kitchen floor. She learned what it was like to be up before dawn, to spend long hours in long skirts and uncomfortable corsets, to play a character completely different from herself. And she also learned, to her surprise, that being away from L.A. wasn’t so bad after all.
“I had a lot more in common with the people in Townsend than I would have expected. People look you in the eye there, they take their time, and they don’t want anything from you. When you go out to a restaurant, the waitress will talk to you for 15 minutes before she takes your order. And I found that I liked it. I really liked it.” If not for her time on her own in Townsend, Martin says she might never have found the courage to leave home for college. But now she is ready to go. “The great thing about Yale,” she says, “is that even if you’re on a television show or on the cover of some magazine, no one cares. It doesn’t matter, because other students are the sons and daughters of prime ministers.”
When Martin began acting at age 7, it was just for fun. Her aunt worked as a governess for Michael Landon’s children and Martin, not knowing any better, told one of them she wanted to be on Little House on the Prairie. An audition was arranged, and the brassy little girl got a part of Landon’s next series, Father Murphy. Martin worked steadily after that, doing commercials, guesting on sitcoms, and playing a recurring role on Valerie’s Family. She was 13 when she got the part of Becca, but she didn’t yet consider acting a career. It was still something she did for fun.
“I don’t think I realized that I wanted to do this forever until the final season of Life Goes On,” she says. Initially, that series focused on the challenges faced by Corky, a character with Down syndrome played by Chris Burke—an actor with Down syndrome. But as Martin’s popularity grew, so did the prominence of Becca, Corky’s sister, leading to a final season in which the show revolved around Becca’s relationship with her HIV-positive boyfriend, played by Chris Lowe.
“Some of those scenes were devastating to play,” recalls Martin. “I can’t tell you how many times I’d read a script and think, “There’s no way I’ll be able to do this.’” Martin would watch the show alone on Sunday nights, grading her performance and mercilessly criticizing every perceived flaw. I put a lot of pressure on myself,” she says. “I try to lighten up, but I’m high-strung, and I tend to take things pretty seriously.”
If Christy gets a green light for more than its initial order of seven episodes, Martin will postpone going to Yale until the winter semester. In the meantime, she says, she’ll try to have more fun.
“I don’t want people to think that I’m too serious. Patti LuPone [who played Martin’s mother on Life Goes On] was always telling me to loosen up. She was always trying to shock me, tell me things that she used to do just to see if I’d do them. She also used to moon people on the set. I haven’t done that yet. But maybe someday. Maybe that should be one of my goals.”