Kelly Rutherford
Kelly Rutherford is an actor, born 1968.
Kelly Rutherford has built a career almost entirely on serialised television, which is a specific skill rather than a lesser one. She came up through daytime, playing Stephanie Whitmore on NBC's Generations from 1989 to 1991, and the discipline shows: hit the mark, land an emotional beat in three lines, come back tomorrow and do it again.
The 1990s were spent auditioning for the next long-running thing. She was Dixie Cousins in The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. in 1993, Caitlin Byrne in the vampire drama Kindred: The Embraced in 1996, and from 1996 to 1999 she was Megan Lewis on Melrose Place, joining that show years after it had started. Film work stayed occasional and small: a bit part in a 1989 slasher, a supporting turn in I Love Trouble in 1994, Christine Hamilton in Scream 3 in 2000.
Then Gossip Girl. As Lily van der Woodsen from 2007 to 2012 she played the adult with money and history in a series mostly interested in teenagers, and she was frequently the most watchable thing in it, because the adults were the only characters with anything real to lose. Since then the work has been network procedurals and, latterly, television movies: Christmas romances, thrillers with one-word titles, the Pretty Little Liars spin-off in 2019. That is a working actor's late career, and she has never seemed embarrassed by it.
Movies (11)
TV (13)
- Gossip Girl (2007)
- Melrose Place (1992)
- The District (2000)
- The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (1993)
- E-Ring (2005)
- Threat Matrix (2003)
- Get Real (1999)
- Homefront (1991)
- Gone (2018)
- Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists (2019)
- Kindred: The Embraced (1996)
- Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures (1992)
- Sally Hemings: An American Scandal (2000)
Where to start with Kelly Rutherford
The obvious entry is Gossip Girl, and it is the right one, but watch it for the parents. Rutherford's Lily is the engine of consequence in that show: every teenage crisis eventually routes through an adult with a lawyer, and she plays that woman with a coolness the younger cast could not have managed.
If you want her before the couture, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. is the pick. A goofy 1890s Western with science fiction bolted onto it, and her role there gives her more mischief than anything else on this list. Melrose Place is the other side of the same coin, prime-time soap at its most shameless, and she arrives late enough that you can simply start with her seasons.
Scream 3 and Kindred: The Embraced cover the genre detours, the first a Hollywood-set sequel that is more fun than its reputation, the second a short-lived vampire series with a genuinely good hook. Pretty Little Liars: The Perfectionists is for completists.