Honestly for today I made a decision based on which of two roles would be easier to find a picture of. Quantum Leap is a relatively modern show with a devoted fan base; there are dozens of fan sites and hundreds of screen shots available. Meanwhile if you want obsessive fans of ‘60s and ‘70s Disney live action, you pretty much have . . . me. And taking screen shots of movies I have on DVD that are generally inaccessible online is more effort than I tend to want to go through for someone who played a minor character who only gets one good scene. Though she was pretty good in that one scene.
Melora Hardin, let’s be real, probably got her start in the industry through good ol’ nepotism. Her father was Jerry Hardin, himself a talented actor that I’ve just rearranged the schedule for again. Her mother is a minor actress, Diane Hardin. And Melora made her screen debut in 1976; she wasn’t even ten at the time. She’s pretty much been acting ever since, and if not a lot of her roles are big enough for her to be a familiar name, well, she’s been doing steady work and you’ve probably seen something she’s done at some point.
Two of the three I know from her are Disney, which, okay, I have a brand. But one of them I think is noteworthy enough so you’d know her, too, even if she’s not in so many words playing a character in the scene. When Neville Sinclair takes Jenny to the South Seas Club in The Rocketeer, the singer is Melora Hardin. Minor, but if it helps you picture her, that’s enough, I suppose. It’s not as though I expect you to remember her as Carmel, the minister’s daughter, from The North Avenue Irregulars, even if the scene where she expresses grief that her father is so involved in fighting the mob is a good one.
Her Quantum Leap appearance is from its later, experimental era. It’s from two of the three “Trilogy” episodes. She was Abigail Fuller, whom Sam is sent three times to protect and who ends up bearing his child in one of those “we’re going to keep changing our mind about how Leaping actually works” things. She’s acting the hell out of the role, and it’s disappointing to me that they didn’t bring her back for the new series to be Sammie Jo, especially given she doesn’t have Scott Bakula’s anger at how the whole series ended the first time around. And they’ve lost their chance now.
Okay, yes, she was Trudy Monk in flashback a lot. (I haven’t watched the movie.) And she did 42 episodes of The Office a show I do not actually like, so maybe she’s a familiar name to you if you do. She did fourteen episodes of Transparent. She’s been working consistently since 1976, and that doesn’t happen with all the nepotism in the world. She’s a talented woman regardless of how she got her start in the industry. Besides, I tend to think that artistic talent runs in families, so why wouldn’t she be a talented daughter of a talented father?
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