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Teri Austin is doing what she always wanted to do -By Lynn HoogenboomTeri Austin no longer finds herself glancing nervously at Knots Landing scripts when they come in.Teri AustinThis season J have a contract, she says with a laugh. Now I open the script and say, ‘Where am I?’ Not ‘Am 1?' Austin, of course, plays Jill Bennett, the young lawyer with whom Gary Ewing (Ted Shackelford) has fallen in love on the popular CBS Thursday-night soap. Before arriving in Los Angeles, Austin, 27, did Canadian theater, television and radio, but she had never worked on a soap.Initially. I found it very difficult/1 she says. I would get sentences that said things like. ‘Youknow what I mean/ and Iwouldn't know what Imeant. I would go to the writers and say, ‘P/ease teil me what I mean/ Now Tve gotten used to playing things a little ambiguously, and it actually makes it pretty interesting.In Canada, she subsidized her acting by cohos ting the Canadian TVshow “Thrill of a Lifetime. which offered to fulfill viewers’ fondest desires — like playing hockey with Wayne Gretzky, for instance.“We would arrange whatever their thrill was, says Austin, then we would interview them. It was all off-the-cutf, and even though we taped, we rarely stopped the tape, so it was like doing a live show. They would always give me the interviews with the people who were, like, comatose. I would say, ‘Here we are with .../ and 1 would look over and their eyes would be glazing over, and it would be like they were on Mars. I would say things like, ‘You had a good time on your thrill, didn’t you?’ just trying to get them to nod- But the show allowed me to go off. work in theater and make my $1.96 a day.Acting is what Austin always knew she wanted to do. I like being other people, she says. When I got old enough to know. I thought, 'Well, either HI be crazy or I'll be an actor/When I was a kid. I’d be downstairs watching Fred Astaire movies. Remember that movie where he lilted that chair over and walked on it? Well, I’d be practicing, and you'd hear the furniture crashing downstairs. And my mother would say. 4 What is going on down there?'If I can keep working as an actress for the rest of my life and never do anything else but this, .I’ll be very happy/'0 V9«7 Coftxxitog
Newspaper Details
The Daily News
Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, US
Fri, Feb 13, 1987
Page 31
Full Page
Clipped by
Anonymous
MI, USA 13 Sep 2017
Other Publications Near Huntingdon, Pennsylvania
Huntingdon Gazette
Huntingdon Journal American
The Daily News
Huntingdon Journal
Huntingdon Globe
