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Wednesday, February 28, 1996
The Green Room Archive
Lauren Holly: Don't Fence Her In

By Jane Wollman Rusoff

AUREN HOLLY'S goal is to break into the elite circle of young female film stars that includes Meg Ryan , Julia Roberts , and Sandra Bullock . "I feel like I'm under this chicken-wire platform with a little bag catching all their crumbs, and I'm trying to figure out how to jump up there with them," says the Pennsylvania-born actress. If the number of recent Lauren Holly movies is any indication, the Picket Fences star may be ready to make the leap.

Ever since Holly co-starred with her real-life beau, Jim Carrey , in the 1994 hit Dumb and Dumber--they fell in love on the set--her screen career has been in high gear. In the last two months, she has played Greg Kinnear 's physician fiancée, in Sabrina , and Matt Dillon's bitchy high school sweetheart, in Beautiful Girls . On March 1, Holly will give us the uptight Lieutenant Emily Lake in Down Periscope, opposite Kelsey Grammer .
"I've never made a huge leap; I've taken baby steps," says Holly, who holds a B.A. in literature from Sarah Lawrence College. Her previous credits include a three-year stint as virginal Julie Chandler on the ABC soap All My Children, a recurring role on the NBC sitcom My Two Dads, the very bad 1986 feature film Band of the Hand--where she met first husband Danny Quinn, son of Anthony--and an affecting performance as Linda Lee in the 1993 biopic Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story . The roles weren't high-profile, but they were all different. "I've managed to jump around from comedy to drama to an action picture and back to a comedy," says Holly proudly, adding that she asked Beautiful Girls director Ted Demme to let her read for the role of vixen Darian Smalls because "I wanted to be a bad girl and give people an idea of the other things I could do."
According to Holly, her ambition delights her boyfriend. "It's fun for Jim, because I'm my own animal." What's not so fun about dating a superstar is the rabid media attention that follows her and Carrey everywhere. "People jump over the wall of my house and go through my garbage can and scream my address out in public places." Then there's tabloid TV. "They've done shows about some unfortunate things that have happened in my family," says Holly, whose fourteen-year-old brother died in a fire at her parents' upstate New York home in 1993. "It hurts. I don't want the fame. I just want the work."
She seems to have plenty of that at the moment. In the midst of her fourth season as Deputy Maxine Stewart on Picket Fences, Holly has started filming Turbulence, in which she plays a plucky flight attendant who must land a 747 after a serial killer (played by Ray Liotta) murders the crew and passengers. Next, she'll headline The Best Woman, a romantic comedy that Universal Pictures bought expressly for her--for what she describes, somewhat incredulously, as "an exorbitant sum."
With each new movie, Holly can't help but wonder whether this will be the one that launches her through that chicken-wire ceiling. "It happens when you get a part that's really close to you and your energy shines out and captures the audience," she says. "Maybe I haven't even read that script yet. I keep hoping I will." In the meantime, though, Holly's not complaining. She knows how far she's come. "Not too long ago," she recalls, "I celebrated because I got a tiny role on My Two Dads."

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