by Bob Thomas
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Having signed on as a regular cast member of ER, Kellie Martin will have to postpone her final year at Yale.
How she managed to combine one of the busiest careers in television with a college education in the first place is cause for wonder. She made her ER debut as a medical student in the season opener of the smash-hit series. This Sunday (Oct. 4) she stars in a CBS movie, About Sarah.
Again, she's a med student. Her grandmother (Marion Ross), has died, and she has become the legal guardian of her mentally retarded mother (Mary Steenburgen). Should she abandon her dream of becoming a doctor to care for her mother? Family secrets are dredged up in her search for an answer.
"I made the movie over my Christmas break from school," said Miss Martin, 22. "I called my dad and told him, 'Dad, you're going to like this movie.' He always gets mad because I'm in movies where I'm usually trying to kill my husband or something like that."
Indeed, for someone who first achieved fame as the lovable teen-ager Becca Thatcher in the ABC series Life Goes On, she has had an array of lurid parts in TV movies.
She has played a manic-depressive (Blue Heaven), a recovering alcoholic and murder suspect (Her Last Chance), a battered wife who kills her husband (If Someone Had Known) and the murderer of a high school cheerleader (A Friend to Die For).
Keeping people alive in ER provides another new experience for the TV series veteran. It's the first time she has joined a show that was up and running.
"It's nice to walk into a show that is well-run, and the kinks have been worked out," she said. "Generally when you join a show there are endless points that you want to change."
Her early start as an actress came about because her aunt worked as a governess for Michael Landon's children. Kellie became a friend of Landon's daughter and one day mentioned, "I want to be on your dad's show." The result: a brief role on Father Murphy.
She has worked almost continuously ever since, notably on the series Life Goes On, Christy and Crisis Center.
Like Jodie Foster, Brooke Shields and Fred Savage, Miss Martin has managed to combine a career with higher education. Could the four child stars have been motivated by a chance to compensate for a youth spent on movie sets?
ER will postpone graduation for Miss Martin, who has one year to go at Yale. But she is used to her acting interrupting her studies.
After high school she took off for 18 months to act in Christy, she said. At college "I come into the semester late sometimes. Then I have to catch up, which is kind of annoying. Otherwise I've had a college experience, which is what I wanted."
She's majoring in art history, with a strong emphasis on photography. No drama?
"No way. I've got enough drama in my life; I don't need to study that."