Young Lions of Stage and Screen

Columbia College Today - September 2000 Archive

Jean Louisa Kelly ’94 is perhaps best known for her role as Rowena in Mr. Holland’s Opus, the 1995 film starring Richard Dreyfuss. She had her first breakthroughs before she attended Columbia, however. While a teenager, she was cast in the Broadway production of Into the Woods, and later starred as the difficult niece in the movie Uncle Buck, a role that gained her considerable attention. But after her chaotic high school years, when she’d travel between New York and her home in central Massachusetts every weekend for months at a time, she decided to step back from her acting career, “chill out a bit and go to college.” And while some of her classmates recognized her from Uncle Buck, she found it easier to blend in at Columbia than at a more insulated school.

Although Kelly had taken voice lessons for most of her life, it wasn’t until Columbia that she took her first formal acting class, scene study with Broadway director Aaron Frankel ’42 (which Futterman also took). It was a revelation. “You come in with monologues, or a scene from a play, and the class talks about it,” Kelly says. “It was great. I learned about techniques that could give me some control in my acting.”

Looking back on her Columbia days, Kelly says that what has stayed with her is the ability to quickly absorb the undercurrents in a script. “The thing that helped me the most is learning how to analyze text,” she says. “I have a step up in reading between the lines.”

Kelly appeared in a few campus productions, and when she graduated she gave herself three months to get an acting job or else she would take her English degree and do something else. She met her deadline by landing an MCI commercial. Soon after, she was cast in Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Auditioning for the movie was nerve-wracking. “I had gone on tape in New York,” Kelly recalls, “and I found out the next week that they were going to fly me out to Oregon [where the movie was filming]. They told me to pack one bag for the audition trip, and pack another bag that your friends can send you if you get the part.” Kelly and another woman read for the role, but the next day both were sent home. A few days later, however, Kelly was told she had been chosen, so she returned to Oregon for filming.

Kelly talks about success as a double-edged sword. Mr. Holland’s Opus opened many doors, but she found herself intimidated by all the attention. “I wasn’t prepared for it,” she says, “and I took a step back. I didn’t audition for a lot of stuff that could have really moved my career forward. Now I think I’m a little more grounded.”

Since then Kelly has continued to work in independent films and television, and she’ll soon be seen in a movie version of The Fantasticks that was filmed in 1995 and then shelved for five years. Last year she starred in an hour-long NBC drama, Cold Feet, about three young couples living in Seattle. The cast filmed eight episodes, but it was cancelled by NBC after just four of them aired. Although that was a major disappointment, Kelly is philosophical. “The network didn’t consider it a priority,” she says. “Stuff happens. The business is hard, there’s a lot of rejection. You have to be able to blow things off, otherwise you spend a lot of time crying.”

Kelly has since signed a deal with CBS to be exclusive to the network, and is working on a new sit-com, Yes, Dear, which debuts this fall (Monday nights at 8:30 p.m. Eastern). Kelly plays an uptight, stay-at-home mom, one who makes baby food from scratch, using organic ingredients. She enjoys comedic roles and would like a long run, but her experience with Cold Feet has left her cautious: “You never know, we could be cancelled immediately.”