Soaps smoothed the way to a stylish Duet
BY IVOR DAVIS
"I am proud to be a graduate of the soap brigade," says Duet leading lady Mary Page Keller.
The star of the half-hour romantic comedy (Sunday at 8:30 p.m.) served a brief stint on Ryan's Hope, and then appeared for two years on Another World where she met her boyfriend, actor Thomas Ian Griffith. And she is the first to say, "It gives you the chance to stretch yourself, make mistakes and then move on."
Keller plays the eye-catching Laura Kelly in the offbeat Fox Television series opposite Matthew Laurance, who is novelist Ben Coleman. The show has clicked because it uses style, class, and considerable humor to trace the couple's relationship. It's fresh and it's funny.
Ben, a transplanted Easterner lives in Hollywood, pens detective novels, is a spontaneous fellow and a fan of junk food.
His girlfriend lives in a funky Venice Beach loft and runs her catering business from the cluttered house. The couple has established single lives. Laura shares her loft with her slightly kooky sister (Jodi Thelen). Chris Lemmon (actor Jack Lemmon's son) and Alison LaPlaca are Ben's friends Richard and Linda Phillips. But the obvious hit of the new show is the peppy Keller who got her break into television in 1982 playing Amanda Kirkland on Ryan's Hope and, for two years, was the beleaguered Sally Frame on Another World.
Today the success of Duet has brought her an antique-filled co-op in Manhattan and a rented house in the Hollywood hills.
As in Cheers, much of the show's appeal depends on whether Laura will say "I do" to her writer boyfriend.
"I'm thrilled we seem to have found the right pace," admits the 26-vear-old actress. "Not surprisingly we had a few rough weeks in the beginning, But that's natural. Once we all got to know each other and began to play off each other it began to work.
"The thing about Duet is there are no 'stars' and no prima donnas." The pretty actress grew up in Los Angeles in a family strongly oriented to show business. Her mother had worked at Walt Disney's factory as an animator on pictures like Pinocchio and Fantasia. But when she was 10, Mary's engineer father moved the family to Silver Spring, Md., and that might have been the end of her theatrical aspirations. But Keller won leads in high school versions of The Wizard of Oz and at the University ot Maryland she earned the lead in The Glass Menagerie.
She read that Ryan's Hope wanted a leading ingenue -- applied and won the role over several hundred applicants.
In between her soap stints she made a quickly-forgotten horror film, Scared Stiff, and then was hired for the Fox series.
"Many of the people I meet in this business went to 'soap college,' " she smiles. "It's one of the best training grounds there is. The money is good, the exposure is formidable and you have to learn so many lines a day that everything else after that is downhill."
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