By Gail Shister
After playing the kid sister of a boy with Down Syndrome (ABC's Life Goes On) and a missionary schoolteacher in 1912 Appalachia (CBS's Christy), Kellie Martin is about to become a big-city doctor.
Martin, 22, will join NBC's ER in the fall as Lucy Knight, a third-year medical student at Chicago's County General. The youngest member of ER's cast didn't have to audition for the role. The producers went to her.
"We had known of her work, and all of us were fans," Lydia Woodward, one of four ER exec producers, said in an interview yesterday. "When we were thinking of bringing on a new character, a student, she was the first person who came to mind."
Martin, who took a break from her art-history studies at Yale last year to star in NBC's mercifully short-lived Crisis Center, will be ER's first regular med student since baby-faced John Carter (Noah Wyle) won viewers' hearts the first two seasons.
"We haven't had a student on the show for a few years," Woodward says, "and we were looking to do some of those stories again." Including lip locks with Carter, now that Dr. Anna Del Amico (Norristown's Maria Bello) has ditched TV's top-rated show?
"It's not in the plans now," Woodward says. What is in the plans is explaining Del Amico's absence on the season-opener. (Bello has left after one season to concentrate on movies. Woodward labels the parting "amicable.")
Martin's Lucy Knight, a Coloradan, is "very bright, very good at the books, but a little naive about the hands-on workings of medicine. We plan to give her the same kinds of flaws we give all our characters."
Martin, a Riverside, Calif., native, broke into acting at age 7 on NBC's Father Murphy. Six years later, she joined Life Goes On as Becca Thatcher, and won an Emmy nomination.
In 1994, Martin played the title role on CBS's Christy, costarring Tyne Daly. Her slew of TV movie credits include Her Hidden Truth, If Someone Had Known and Hidden in Silence. (Do we sense a theme here?)
Martin "has a tremendous amount of energy," Woodward says. "As the youngest member of the cast, she'll be very good at playing the neophyte role within the emergency room."
Integrating yet another new character into ER's huge ensemble will be "sort of fun," Woodward predicts. "Our cast is very used to new people coming. It doesn't throw anybody any curves."