Melinda Clarke
Melinda Clarke is an actor, born 1969.
Clarke grew up inside the business. Her father was a longtime cast member of Days of Our Lives, and her own first sustained job was on the same show, playing Faith Taylor from 1989 to 1990. Genre film took it from there: in 1993, billed as Mindy Clarke, she led Return of the Living Dead III, and by 1997 she was the assassin Jessica Priest in Spawn.
What she is unusually good at is the woman who is perfectly pleasant right up to the moment she is not. Julie Cooper on The O.C. set the template, a Newport social climber who could deliver an apology and a threat in the same sentence, in a show that cast her as a stock obstacle and then discovered she was the most interesting adult in it. The dominatrix Lady Heather, whom she played across a decade of CSI appearances, is the same instrument tuned to seduction. Amanda on Nikita, from 2010 to 2013, is that instrument turned to ice, an interrogator who runs cruelty like a performance review.
The rest is a working character actor's ledger, and a varied one: a cigarette girl in Mulholland Falls, voice work as Alexa in the Animatrix segment Matriculated, a nicely self-mocking turn as herself on Entourage, casino power broker Lena Cavallo on Vegas, syndicated action on Soldier of Fortune, Inc., and horror oddities like Killer Tongue. Television keeps hiring her for one reason. She can drop a scene's temperature without raising her voice.
Movies (7)
TV (11)
Where to start with Melinda Clarke
Begin at The O.C., and not for nostalgia. Julie Cooper is where you see Clarke play ambition as an athletic event, all charm and calculation, and watch a supporting antagonist quietly annex a teen soap.
Follow it with Nikita, which strips the warmth out of the same technique and leaves an interrogator you believe could ruin someone politely. For the earlier, stranger Clarke, Return of the Living Dead III is the horror lead genre fans still argue about, and Spawn uses her as a genuinely nasty piece of work rather than decoration.
Two short detours are worth the time: Entourage, where she sends up her own casting, and Vegas, which hands her a room she is supposed to own. The Animatrix is completist territory only, since her part there is one segment.