I am obsessed with Kellie Martin.
I won't argue with that. I'll admit to it freely. As I'm sitting at my computer, with a background of Kellie Martin, in my dorm room (at the moment, I am a college Freshman), I have an 8" x 10" picture of her on the wall next to my bed and a quote from her ("I realize I don't know how to get drunk and have fun, how to hang out, party, be a teenager and chill out. But acting was my choice.") on the outside of my door. I have no fewer than 23 pictures of her saved on my computer because I haven't the heart to delete them and no fewer than six desktop wallpapers of her (two of which I made). My regular duties whenever I get on the internet are (1) to check my Hotmail e-mail, (2) to check my GetRocked e-mail, and (3) to check the Kellie Martin Mailing List.
See? I am obsessed.
What you might wonder is why.
The reason I am obsessed with Kellie Martin is a quite simple amalgam of factors that can be summed up in one sentence: she is perfect. She is easily the most beautiful woman in the world (I'm thinking Peri Gilpin or Larissa Oleynik would be second, and I wouldn't count either as being even the same species as Kellie Martin), she is a female actor of uncanny ability (surpassed only by Emma Thompson), she is very intelligent (a Yale graduate), she has good taste in her work most of the time (About Sarah, All You Need, Her Last Chance, On the Edge of Innocence, Matinee, and A Friend to Die For/Death of a Cheerleader are all good movies and even Her Hidden Truth isn't BAD; however, The Face on the Milk Carton was a slip), she seems to be a very sweet person, she is about as opposite of the typical Hollywood actor persona as possible, she refuses to lose weight so that she can look good on camera because she'd "rather be happy in person," she left the number one television show in the world ("ER") so that she could finish school (at Yale), and she also seems to be a very practical person in the insanely impractical world of Los Angeles.
I am obsessed.
Her career is very interesting to me as well, because it seems that it is quite easy to mark her development as an actor, but then she seems to defy it every once in a while. Her worst work that I have seen is easily the 1996 TV movie Her Last Chance. Her best, meanwhile, is in the 2001 independent film All You Need. In between, she gave excellent performances in On the Edge of Innocence and About Sarah while before she gave a decent-but-not-memorable performance in Her Hidden Truth, great performances in The Face on the Milk Carton and A Friend to Die For, and a funny performance hampered by the lack of a real developed character in Matinee. So, from Her Last Chance on, she improved every film. I discount Matinee because she didn't have a real deep character, so the earliest one before that is A Friend to Die For, and from that point through Her Last Chance she seemed to decline. So, now I reach the chronology that from 1994 (A Friend to Die For) through 1996 (Her Last Chance), she was in a period of decline. However, she did not become bad at all, which is one of the good points of starting out in such a high place as A Friend to Die For (which is also sometimes called by the title Death of a Cheerleader, if that's confusing anyone), in which she gives the absolute most frightening look I have ever seen in my life. After that, she seems to have made a return in 1997 with the bipolar role of Zoe Tyler in On the Edge of Innocence and improved further for About Sarah before reaching her pinnacle in one of the greatest performances of all time in All You Need in 2001. An odd chronology, yes, but still fairly easy to track.
The point of all this about "tracking her career" is to say that I find it interesting to watch Kellie's performances (when you're in love with someone from afar, I think you're allowed to call him/her by a first name, by the way) over time to see the way she develops. It's very interesting to see the amorous teen of Matinee compared with the at times unbelievable drunk/drug addict of Her Last Chance compared with the heavily conflicted almost multi-personalitied teen of The Face on the Milk Carton. And that's only covering two years.
I said she generally has good taste in her work. I checked and my average rating for her movies that I have seen on the IMDb is almost a 7. By comparison, John Travolta's is a 3.1, Robin Williams's (the best actor in the world) is a 6, Bruce Willis's is a 5, and Mel Gibson is a 4.6. That's including Robin Williams playing a minor role as Osric in one of the greatest films of all time, Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet and Willis's aberration in another of of my all-time favorites, Unbreakable. (How often are those two films used in the same sentence?)
So, there you have it. I am completely obsessed with Kellie Martin, but I have reasons (and notice that I shied away from waxing poetically about her beauty . . .). Does that excuse my obsession? No. Does it really make it reasonable for me to fall in love with her? No. So, why did I write this? That's simple!
I just wanted to have a reason to write a column about her.
-Damien Sweet (9/4/2003)
