Articles about Danica and/or Crystal McKellar



01) 06/22/89 - Teen Celebs turn out for Bob Bash touting Pop's new Kids
02) 04/23/90 - Names in the News: Sisters Rivals on Wonder Years
03) 05/06/90 - Winsome Winnie: The Actress Behind the Girl Behind the Boy
04) 04/14/91 - Starry ride - Stage mothers of the '90s can't be typecast
05) 03/08/92 - Afternoon special for children teaches 50 ways to save planet
06) 10/08/97 - Revisiting Wonder Years' Winnie
07) 03/18/98 - Winnie Goes Back to Work
08) xx/xx/98 - Celebs are not too cool for school
09) 01/23/99 - "Wonder Years" Couple Still Close
10) 01/29/99 - Scratching the itch on our celebrity skin
11) 02/12/99 - True Romance on The Wonder Years Set
12) 09/29/03 - Danica in the Play "Proof"



DM1) "Teen Celebs Turn Out For Bop Bash Touting Pop'a New Kids"

Los Angeles Times, June 22, 1989

Teen dream Kirk Cameron wasn't there (although his three sisters were), and Tiffany was a no-show. Otherwise, a Who's Who of teen-age Hollywood - from Soleil Moon Frye of TV's Punky Brewster to Growing Pains' Jeremy Miller - turned out for a party Tuesday night feting the hot new teen singing group, New Kids on the Block, who are as wholesome as the Osmonds. In the crowd were Rain Pryor, 20, of Head of the Class; Jason Marsden, 14, of The Munsters Today; 12-year-old Brandon Call ("Formerly of The Champ and Santa Barbara," trumpeted his mother, Elyse); sisters Danica and Crystal McKellar of The Wonder Years; members of the pop group The Boys; 13-year-old modeling star Milla Jovovich, and Josh Harris, 10, of Dallas.



DM2) "Names In The News - Sisters Rivals On Wonder Years"
Times Wire Services, April 23, 1990

Danica McKellar, Winnie Cooper on ABC's Wonder Years, is a polite 15-year-old who gets A's in school. Perfect casting, right?

"I'm not Winnie," Danica said in the April 28 issue of TV Guide. "Winnie is perfect. She has no faults. And she does what the script says."

Danica was cast as the potential love interest of series star Fred Savage just days before The Wonder Years started shooting. It came down to two candidates, Danica and her 13-year-old sister, Crystal. "It was practically a tossup," said casting head Mary Buck. "But finally they picked Danica."

Crystal has appeared on the show as Winnie's rival, Becky.

"We don't compete," Danica said. "We each give a performance and do the best we can, and it's up to the producers."



DM3) "Winsome Winnie: The Actress Behind The Girl Behind The Boy"
by Daniel Cerone, L.A. Times Orange County Edition, May 6, 1990

"It's weird. People come up and say, "Hi Winnie!" They know me, but I don't know them." The truth is, most people only know 15-year-old Danica McKellar as Winnie Cooper, Kevin Arnold's puppy love affair on The Wonder Years. The show has completely swept bittersweet TV audiences into the post-pubescent liaisons of the two star-crossed lovers. The first kiss. The Valentine's card. The make-out room.

What makes Danica nervous that is some people don't want to know who Winnie really is. They want to believe Kevin and Winnie's relationship is as authentic and tangible as their own fragile memories of first love. "So many people are tied up in the relationship," Danica said. "It's kind of freaky."

Fred Savage agrees. "Sometimes when I'm walking down the street, people will yell out, "Hey Kevin, where's Winnie?," he said. "It just makes me laugh."

"Right now we're together, so everything is OK," Danica said. "But it can't last too long, or we wouldn't have a story, right?"

The young actress said that at the very least, people want to believe that she and Fred are an item off screen. "Everybody asks that. Everybody wants to know if Fred and I are going out. And they want it to be true. They want it to be real."

Danica exhaled a deep breath, like a teacher repeating information for the students who weren't listening. "We're good friends. That's all." On the set, Danica and Fred interact like any of the other young actors - in fact, just like the regular kids that they are. "A lot of times I may be having a conversation with Fred on the set, and similar lines will appear in the script two weeks later because the writers were listening," Danica explained.

The Wonder Years is Danica's first acting job on a regular series, following three years of acting school and bit TV parts. "It's not like having a job at the mall on Sunday," she said. When Danica was 12, she answered a cattle call for the role of Winnie. The field was ultimately narrowed down to her and another girl - her younger sister.

"I tried out for the part with my sister, Crystal," Danica said. "We both got a call back the next day. It was down to just the two of us. They kept us there until late that night trying to decide. Finally, they told me that I got the job, but they liked Crystal so much that they wrote a part for her also."

As it turned out, 13-year-old Crystal plays Becky, Kevin's girlfriend before Winnie. Although Kevin received his first kiss from Winnie in the pilot, Winnie found an older boyfriend, so Kevin took up with Becky for a short-lived fling earlier this season.

Both sisters live with their parents in West Los Angeles. Danica doesn't see future scripts of The Wonder Years until the episode is being shot. So she wasn't able to provide any insight into what's in store for Kevin and Winnie's relationship. But she expects to be around for the duration of the series, even if it's in a limited role.

"I think The Wonder Years will run the five years of its contract," she said, "and not get picked up after that. We all want to go on to other things. I want to act in films. We'll all be grown up at that point, anyway. I'll be 18 years old. There won't be as much left to wonder about then."



DM4) "Starry Ride - Stage Mothers Of The '90s Can't Be Typecast"
Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1991

Mahaila McKellar, mother to Danica McKellar, 16, who plays Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, and Crystal McKellar, 14, who has a recurring role on the series, says she does not want or need to live off her children's income.

"Though we're divorced, their father and I remain friends," she says. "He is very generous with us. He takes care of all of their needs now and will pay for their education. Our kids weren't hungry." Judy Savage, the McKellars' agent, declines to say how much Danica and Crystal earn. The industry standard for a new child actor on a network series is $5,000 for a half-hour episode and up to $10,000 for an hour episode, she says: "If the show is a long-running hit, it's not unusual for a child actor to make up to $500,000 a season."

Each McKellar daughter was allowed to put in another telephone line and buy a phone and an answering machine. The girls pay their monthly telephone bill. The rest is invested as a nest egg for after college.

"Danica knows how much she makes, and what we are doing with it," McKellar says. "She is not yet allowed to make decisions about investments, but she is included in all discussions.

"We recently renegotiated her contract for The Wonder Years, and I put her on the phone with the lawyer so that he could explain it all to her. Off the top, a certain amount goes into a trust that none of us can touch. Her father is a very sharp businessman; he helps me invest the rest.

"I never thought we'd be here," she says. "I thought it was like my mother taking me to dance revues, except they might make a little money at it." What does she want most for her children?

"I want them to be happy," she says.



DM5) "Afternoon Special For Children Teaches 50 Ways To Save Planet"
The San Diego Union-Tribune, March 8, 1992

Based on Javna's paperback book of the same title, the show uses the Muppets, La Jolla's Crystal McKellar and other TV celebrities familiar to children to get its message across. What's the message?

"That we're handing them a very damaged world," said Javna, "a world whose ability to support life is threatened."

Youngsters in preschool to high school are shown acting out Javna's 50 "save the Earth" activities, which include recycling, tree planting, car-pooling, stopping use of plastic foam cups and saving the rain forests.

"This program speaks to the people who can most do something," said Javna, cautioning that he doesn't regard himself as an alarmist, merely a realist.

"For our children, learning how to save the Earth will be matter of survival," he said. "I hope parents will watch with that in mind."



DM6) Revisiting Wonder Years' Winnie
by Barry Koltnow, The Orange County Register, October 8, 1997

The pilot episode of The Wonder Years, the one that begins with little Winnie Cooper learning that her older brother was killed in Vietnam and ends with her first kiss, was more than just another TV show to Danica McKellar. McKellar, the young actress who played Winnie for six seasons on the show, said Tuesday morning that she shared that experience of a first kiss with her character. (Kyle's note - Barry has the opening wrong, obviously. Brian's death came near the end.)

"I was 12 at the time and it was my first kiss as well as Fred's, and we were very anxious," she said by phone from college, where she is studying math.

"It was a big deal. No, it was a huge deal to me, and in one of the takes that did not make it on the show, you could see me making this stupid smile just as we were about to kiss. I was so nervous.

"But the producers were very nice about it. They printed all six takes of the kiss and gave copies to Kevin and I. That's what it was like growing up on that show. It's like having the greatest home videos of all time."

McKellar, who said she hopes to return to acting after college, said she never expected the series to run for six seasons and had good reason not to expect to be a part of it even if it did have a long run.

"Winnie was supposed to be a guest shot on the pilot and that was it," she said. "My sister and I were both up for the role (her sister was later cast as Becky in the series) and we were both told to return for a second audition after dinner.

"My sister and I were eating dinner with my mother in this restaurant and this boy walked in and sat at the next table. I remember looking at him and thinking how cute he was. When we got back to the set, we had to audition with that same boy, who turned out to be Fred Savage."

The actress said the producers told her after the pilot that they wanted to make her character permanent on the show and the rest, as they say, is The Wonder Years.



DM7) "Winnie Goes Back To 'Work'"

by Scott Williams, Daily News (New York), March 18, 1998

OH MY, WINNIE! How you've changed! Or, more accurately, how Danica McKellar has changed. McKellar, who played sweetheart Winnie Cooper to Fred Savage's Kevin Arnold on five seasons of The Wonder Years, reunites with him on tonight's episode of his NBC sitcom, Working.

"He's grown up a lot, but there's still the same old chemistry there even though the characters are completely different," she told The News.

"It was strange calling him a name besides Kevin on camera," she said. "I never have that impulse with Fred in person, but when the cameras are rolling, it's difficult to call him something else."

The cute adolescent girl is long gone, metamorphosed into a poised, lovely young woman who put her acting career on hold so she could focus on her math studies in UCLA's honors program.

"For the first couple of years I did TV movies and a few guest spots," she told The News. "But I found myself having to decide whether to study for that math test or study for this audition."

College won. "I decided that since I never got the full high school experience, I might as well get the full college experience," she said.

Not that she's complaining. "Sure, I lost something, but I gained a lot," she noted.

"I learned a lot about myself playing Winnie Cooper. It was like looking in a mirror. I think they were actually writing about me, sometimes," said McKellar, who found herself acting out adolescent problems before she actually experienced them.

"I felt very close to Fred and Josh [Saviano, who played nerdy best friend Paul]. They were like brothers to me. I own every episode and to watch us grow up is very special for me."

Although Savage interrupted his Stanford education to take the Working lead, Saviano is still in school, at Yale, and wants to go to law school, she said.

McKellar doesn't boast about it, but she's graduating this spring summa cum laude. "My major is pure mathematics, more of the theoretical stuff and less grounded in practical things. It's the abstract problems that I love most."

How abstract?

"I did a research project completely independent of my undergraduate studies. It was in statistical mathematics," she said.

Aha. And what was the title of the project? She took a deep breath and responded: "Percolation and Gibbs-states multiplicity for ferromagnetic Ashkin-Teller models in two dimensions."

Despite her obvious passion for higher math, McKellar said she has no plans for graduate school right now and is going back to acting.

"One thing I've learned, sometimes life shows you things you didn't know were there," she said. "I'm at peace knowing what I want to do right now."



DM8) "Celebs Are Not Too Cool For School"

by Marc S. Malkin, The New York Post

Just days into his junior year as a transfer student at Brown University, Nate Albert, guitar player for the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, knew he wasn't going to have the usual college experience.

"I was in an orientation group last night with like 50 other people, and we had to go around and say what we'd been doing before coming to Brown," Albert says by phone from his off-campus apartment in Providence, R.I.

"They got to me and I said, 'I'm in a band called the Mighty Mighty Bosstones.' Everyone freaked out. They were like, 'No way, man!' And then a lot of people came up to me afterward and were like telling me how they saw one of our shows in like Minneapolis, Boston, California or someplace else."

If it's weird for Albert to hit the books, just imagine what it's like for this year's best-known college freshman, Claire Danes, who has taken a break from moviemaking to attend Yale. Danes probably will never have to explain who she is, considering she's one of the most celebrated young actresses around.

Shortly after being accepted, she told one reporter she was totally paranoid and petrified about going to Yale, "because, I'm going to be in a group of people who continued to go down the path I was planning on going when I was 13, and they'll probably be in a different league."

Danes and Albert aren't the first celebs to go collegiate. Buffy the Vampire Slayer star Sarah Michelle Gellar and supermodel Christy Turlington currently study at New York University. Jodie Foster earned a degree from Yale and now encourages young stars to pursue college. Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton long after she had become a household name.

First Daughter Chelsea Clinton starts her sophomore year at Stanford later this month. And this summer, teen heartthrob Jonathan Taylor Thomas surprised many in the industry when he announced that he was ending his seven-year run on Home Improvement to concentrate on getting into college.

So why do young millionaire celebs leave the pampered life of Tinseltown for required reading, ulcer-inducing finals and mess-hall mystery meat?

"Being an actress doesn't mean forever," says Tia Mowry, who not only co-stars with her twin sister, Tamera, on TV's Sister, Sister but also attends Pepperdine University with her. "You always have to have that backup. Some people don't understand that."

Even Ivy League-educated folks don't always understand. When Tatyana Ali, a pop singer who first became famous playing Will Smith's cousin on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, was interviewing for Harvard, she says she was taken aback by how skeptical some of the alums were. "The alumni interviews were like, 'So, why do you want to go to school?'" 19-year-old Ali says from a hotel in London, where she is promoting her debut album, Kiss the Sky, just three days before starting her freshman year at Harvard.

"It was so strange - people doubted whether or not I was serious. Of course I'm serious. Out of anybody applying, I really don't have to go. I'm going because I really want to."

But unlike some celebs who decided to leave Hollywood behind for four years, Ali is still going to work while she's in school. Forget Friday and Saturday night keg parties - Ali's going to be hitting the road whenever she can.

"I have the funniest itinerary of any recording artist at Sony," she says, "because it has my test dates and my class schedule in it."

Kevin O'Connell, editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News, a student newspaper, has seen his fair share of celebs at the Ivy League school. He once lived in the same dormitory as Sara Gilbert (who played Darlene on Roseanne) and says everyone's been talking about Danes' arrival.

"I think there's the initial excitement and star-searching that I think would happen anywhere," O'Connell says. But that initial novelty wears off.

But does it really? No matter how long someone's been going to a school, if he or she is a celeb, there's always going to be those awkward moments.

"When I started high school, '"Fresh Prince' was in its prime, says Ali, who is living with five suite-mates at Harvard. It takes about a week for people to recognize you. Then they feel weird around you, and then they're apprehensive. But then the first person actually comes up to you and eventually everybody else hears you're actually cool.

Ali sounds like Shields did when she was a lonely student at Princeton and her fellow Tigers were grumbling that the teen stunner didn't share their smarts. (Unlike Ivy League dropout Matt Damon - a Harvard expatriate - Shields actually graduated, with a degree in French literature.)

Admissions officers interviewed by The Post say that fame alone won't open a university's doors to a substandard student. But none can deny that extracurricular activities such as hit television shows and movies outshine varsity letters in tiddlywinks.

"How much that plays into the admissions-office picture, I couldn't tell you," says Virginia Bush, an educational consultant who advises high schoolers and their parents on college, including some celeb clients - she won't say who. "I certainly don't think it hurts. But I think the fact is these kids still have to be talented students."

"I don't think that any of the top colleges or even the lesser-competitive ones would necessarily change their admission standards just because a student is a celebrity," Bush said. "At least, I hope they wouldn't."

It's not as though Danes were betting on her box-office appeal to land an acceptance letter to a posh school like Yale.

"Claire Danes got into Yale because Claire Danes earned every one of her credits," insists Alan Simon, president of On Location Education, a New York City firm that provides tutors for celeb students, including Danes, who are unable to attend regular school.

"I would take exception to the notion that just because they are who they are that schools are just knocking down the walls to get them. These schools have criteria."

These schools also insist that even if some students and faculty may get star struck, celeb students be treated just as everyone else. After Danica McKellar, who played Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years, entered UCLA, she tried to balance her show-business and academic careers. The juggling act didn't work, so after 18 months she opted to concentrate on school full time - as a math major, no less.

"You tend to get a lot more dedication when it's such a difficult subject," says McKellar, who graduated in the spring and is just now returning to the auditioning circuit. "Sometimes The Wonder Years would come up, but generally speaking, if anything, they'd come up to me because I knew how to do a problem and they didn't."

It wasn't so simple her first year, though. "People would point and go, 'Hey, Winnie!' and laugh and be obnoxious," says McKellar. But eventually that died down, especially when they saw how much she wanted to be a normal student.

In fact, McKellar is probably one of the few actresses in Hollywood who can say she's been published in an academic journal. She recently co-authored a mathematics paper being published in a future issue of the Journal of Physics.

A college campus, it seems, may be the only place where stars can lead a normal life. Most paparazzi have been respectful of Danes and other celebrities on campus. And the schools themselves help shield their famous faces from unwanted attention.

Though the Yale Daily News published an article about Danes' decision to attend Yale, the paper has not published any stories about Danes since her arrival on the New Haven campus.

"She's a regular Yale student and we want her to have a great time at Yale," editor O'Connell says. "We don't want to impinge on her personal life."



DM9) "Wonder Years Couple Still Close"

UltimateTV - News, January 23, 1999

Although they do not see each other on a daily basis anymore, The Wonder Years stars Danica McKellar and Fred Savage remain very close.

"We were like brother and sister in a lot of ways," says McKellar, who played Kevin Arnold's sweetheart Winnie Cooper on the popular series. "Fred and I have kept in touch the whole time. My friendship with Fred is timeless."

McKellar is returning to acting after graduating Summa cum Laude with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from UCLA. She recently appeared in an episode of Savage's latest series, NBC's Working. The Wonder Years currently airs Weeknights at 10:30 p.m. on TV Land.



DM10) "Scratching The Itch On Our Celebrity Skin"

The Yale Herald, January 29, 1999



Everything you ever wanted to know about Yale celebs and the men who love them

Last year, I was standing behind Kellie Martin in line at Ashley's," says Mike Stafford, PC '00. "I asked her how the bittersweet chocolate was, and she just gave me this look, like `how dare you ask me about ice cream?'"

"Sara Gilbert, ES '97, bumped into me once outside of Stiles," reports Rob Stilling, MC '99. "She was carrying a huge bag of laundry. And another time, she bummed a cigarette off of one of my friends."

"Josh Saviano, BR '98, served me a beer at a frat party last year," one student claims.

"The girl from Adventures in Babysitting was in one of my sections," says another. (Kyle's note - that is Maia Brewton, who played Linda Sloan in the episode "Don't You Know Anything About Women?")

If you ask Yalies if they have any stories about celebrity encounters, they're sure to provide you with one or two of these little gems. They probably won't remember what they had for breakfast that morning, but they will recall, in brilliant detail, what brand and flavor of potato chip Sara Gilbert was buying when she stood in front of them at Store 24 in October, 1996. It could be the shock of seeing someone from a frequently-watched TV show buying towels at the Co-op. It could be the stunning realization that the normal-looking girl who's sitting three rows in front of you in Psych 110 has french-kissed Leonardo DiCaprio. For whatever reason, we treat our run-ins with celebrities as something special, something memorable, when really, they aren't.

Of course, this isn't a phenomenon restricted to Yale; practically everybody remembers his or her brief brushes with fame. But the encounters should be expected, and shouldn't be especially memorable. No student celebrity lives more than four blocks from his or her non-TV star classmates, and the famous and non-famous alike have unbelievably similar daily routines. The celebrities don't sneak off into secret Viper Rooms to snort cocaine and hang out with rock stars; they eat at Commons and hang out with schlubby, sweatpants-wearing Yale students.

At Yale, celebrities aren't really celebrities anymore; they've put their fame aside for a while, and become, more or less, like us. They live and act like the rest of us, and they do what the rest of us do. But unless we're close friends with them, we turn our heads when they walk by and talk excitedly about the mundane things we've seen them do. It's fun; it gives us something new to talk about. But what's it like for the actors and actresses?

Remember me?

"It always surprises me when it happens," says Crystal McKellar, TC '99, when asked how she feels about being approached by people she doesn't know. To the avid couch potato, McKellar is best known as Becky Slater, Fred Savage's sometime girlfriend on the hit show The Wonder Years — but at Yale, she's an active member of the Tory Party and an editor of Portia. "It doesn't happen too frequently — probably about once a week. It happened a lot more freshman year, and there's always a spurt in September. When Nick-at-Nite ran a Wonder Years marathon last fall, people started coming up to me more often."

It's nice to see how well McKellar handles her status as a former prime-time celebrity. She doesn't seem annoyed that I've called her at 11:30 p.m. to talk about The Wonder Years. She says she's not bothered when people come up to her and ask about her days spent hangin' with Winnie Cooper. "It's always a good conversation starter at parties," she says, laughing. "When I don't know anyone, it gives us something to talk about."

Like McKellar, Nicole Dubuc, MC '00, doesn't care when a stranger points her out as a former star of CBS's Major Dad and ABC's Our House. "It happens about once a month, usually in weird places like Au Bon Pain," she says. "I'll notice someone staring at me from afar, and then they'll come up to me and start talking. I don't mind it, except for the fact that I get teased a lot — everyone always seems to remember the most embarrassing episodes I was in." And like McKellar, Dubuc's fame was boosted by Yale's deal with Comcast. "When we got cable, the number of times I got spotted jumped," she says.

For actors and actresses, Yale provides an opportunity to get out from under the media microscope and pursue what Dubuc calls "normal activities." In a piece for Esquire in December 1982, then-junior Jodie Foster, CC '84, commented on how Yale was a welcome escape from her life as a film star: "My personality changed. I took on a screw-the-world dress code. I had my first and last bout with tequila. I did ska dances in the street, water-ballooned singing groups, philosophized and talked dirty till five in the morning. The control I'd had all those years was self-imposed and alienating. Now I was able to make mistakes." Foster enjoyed her life as a Lit major so much that she began to question her career as an actress — to her, anonymity was far more appealing than a life spent drowning in Hollywood bullshit. "I wanted to be at Yale forever," she wrote, "The idea of returning to a dressing room in a Winnebago, being called Miss Foster, seemed foreign, unnatural. I didn't want to return those phone calls from home, from agents, from polite employers."

Foster's fame had become hideously apparent by March of her freshman year, when a madman's attempt on the President's life thrust her from the Old Campus back into national headlines. No matter where she went, her celebrity status was not something Foster could leave behind; it was a significant part of her life, and she had to deal with it.

So it seems Yale doesn't make a good hideout for the young and famous. Still, I find myself asking, if celebrities who can be seen only in late-night reruns get approached by strangers once a week, what would life be like for, say, someone who can be seen in the latest issue of Jane singing karaoke with Winona Ryder? Someone who's been on the cover of Vogue and has 9,000 web sites devoted to her? How would someone like that deal with the pressure, the constant attention?

There's only one way to find out, I tell myself, and I pick up the phone.

Brian has no so-called life

It takes me about 20 minutes to get up the nerve to call, but I finally do, and I hear a female voice at the other end. "Is Claire around?" I ask. "This is she," says the voice, and then, quickly, "Who's calling?"

I stammer for a few seconds, and then tell her my name, and that I'm working on an article about fame at Yale, and that I can't complete it without at least trying to talk to her, so would she mind if I asked her a few questions?

"Sure," she says. "But I'm on the other line, and then I'm going to go to bed. Will it take a long time?"

I stammer some more, and tell her I don't know.

"Can I call you tomorrow?" she asks. I tell her she can, and give her my number. "I'm sorry. I'm just really stressed out."

"I'm sure," I say, fumbling like a spaz. "You're probably the most stressed person in the world now."

She chuckles. "Oh no, it's not really like that."

I thank her and hang up. I know she's not going to call me back, and I don't care. She didn't hang up on me, or curse me out, or send goons over to my room to beat me up. She sounded like a normal person — a normal person who just wanted to be left alone.



DM11) "True Romance On The Wonder Years Set"

by Susan Campbell Beachy, Dish, February 12, 1999

What was Wonder Years star Danica McKellar's most romantic moment? Here's a clue: It happened on the show.

The very first episode of the sentimental series called for McKellar's character, Winnie Cooper, to kiss her pal Kevin Arnold, played by Fred Savage. "That was really my first kiss in real life, and it was really Fred's first kiss, and at the time we both kind of had a crush on each other," McKellar tells Dish. "It was one of the most nerve-racking, exciting, romantic moments you can imagine. I knew exactly when my first kiss was going to happen, and I was dying of anticipation."

McKellar says she faced quite an acting challenge in the scene. "My character's brother had just died," she explains, "and I was supposed to be all sad. But I broke into a smile right before we kissed. I couldn't stand it. Here it was, my first kiss."

When the show aired, however, the doe-eyed little actress looked suitably glum. "They didn't use the take where I smiled," she says.

The chemistry between the youthful pair hasn't been forgotten: Winnie and Kevin are among the featured duos in TV's Most Romantic Couples, a special from TV Guide and Romance Classics that airs Sunday on both American Movie Classics (8:30 pm/ET) and Romance Classics (9:30 pm/ET).



DM12) "Proof" starring Danica, at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, Sep/Oct 2003.

I drove the 90 miles to San Diego on Sunday, Oct 26, 2003 to see the play. Supposedly it was the last show of the entire run, but it was going to be held over another week. I've only seen one play before - "The Music Man" when I was about 8 years old. I was quite impressed with the story and acting of the 4 characters. It even had a "flash-back" in it, then resumed the "present" by duplicating the outfits and positions from an earlier scene - pretty slick.

Danica looked great, especially the first 3 outfits - lightweight shirt with cut-off's and barefoot, then T-shirt and plaid boxers ditto, then black evening dress. It evolved through cold weather wear (supposedly takes place in Chicago), then long leather jacket with knit blouse, black slacks and boots.

Program front cover.


Postcard front.


In a nutshell, her character gets drunk in the first scene and gets a visit (then and later, too) from the ghost of her dad (whose funeral is the next day) who is a brilliant-but-crazy mathematician. She does the horizontal bop (bop not shown) with one of the dad's students who is looking through the dad's 106 notebooks of apparently crazy gibberish. Her sister visits and wants her to move to New York with her (and maybe put her in the nuthouse for depression, etc). It turns out the one notebook with a real 40-page, earth-shaking, mathematical proof was written by her and not the dad.
Postcard rear.


The neat thing is it was a small theater and I was in the second row - just right-of-center on Oct 26, and front row, just left-of-center on Nov 1 (red dots). Much of the action took place only 10 or 12 feet away, near the steps at the front. The stage only had 2 tables with chairs (shown by circles) and a piano against the wall, and the set of the house had a working front door and side door with interior staircase to the second storey.

The movie version starring Gwyneth Paltrow is in the makings, but I don't know if a Hollywood picture can maintain the intimacy of the stage version. Incidentally, on Oct 26, smoke and ash from the annual California wildfires was hanging over much of Southern California - including San Diego (Danica was born in La Jolla, a northern suburb of SD), which reduced the audience turnout significantly - so much so that the marketing director had people near the back and sides move toward the front area.



I left a "thank you" card with a surly usher to forward to her, but having gotten no response (either email or guest-book entry), I assume he failed miserably.



Articles about TWY
Articles about Cast/Crew
Archives
Wonder Years Menu

11/12/14 17:30