Word: walk-on
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...educated in a convent in Liverpool, where her father is a grocer. Before she was cast by Richardson, her entire experience consisted of the role of a frog in a school play, the rear end of a horse in pantomime, and walk-on bits as an apprentice with the Liverpool Repertory Theater, whose alumni include Sir Michael Redgrave and Rex Harrison...
With all her campus activities, plus keeping house for her brothers, Pat still had energy left over to fill extra roles in motion pictures (she had a $25-a-day walk-on part in Becky Sharp) and to work as a part-time saleslady at Bullock's-Wilshire, a fashionable department store. She graduated with honors and a high school teacher's certificate. Finding a job was no problem: her first assignment, at $187 a month, was teaching commercial subjects at Whittier Union High School in the quiet, Quaker suburb of Whittier. Some of her colleagues foresaw trouble...
Trying to get to Europe in 1954, she made it as far as New York before she ran short of cash. She wound up with a walk-on part in the road company of Teahouse of the August Moon, and one day while on tour she wandered into Seattle's Colony, an offbeat supper club. She talked Owner Norm Bobrow into letting her try a few numbers with the band, brought down the house. Three years later, Pat was still at the Colony. "How long will she stay?" Bobrow's friends kept asking him. He always gave them...
Good stagy stuff, and more to come. When the girl finally gets a tryout for a walk-on as a French peasant ("He's playing cards in the bar"), she flunks it spectacularly by scuffing onstage like a marked-down Magnani and declaring in a studied crescendo: "He is at the estaminet playing [pause] BEZIQUE!" And when a young playwright takes her to an opening-night party, she gets drunk, embarrasses him and bores everybody else by climbing on the nearest eminence to recite "0 Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?" But suddenly nobody is bored. She is reading...
...detention camp in Colorado, graduated from California's San Jose State College and lit out for New York and (she hoped) Europe before settling for a teaching career. In Manhattan her money dribbled away. To pay the rent Pat was willing to try anything, landed a walk-on spot in the road company of Teahouse of the August Moon. Cast members heard her after-hours warbling, urged her to go professional. She memorized The Rodgers and Hart Song Book, was signed by the Colony at first hearing...