Melissa Errico
Melissa Errico's main stage is the actual stage. She made her name in Broadway musicals, playing Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady and the title role in One Touch of Venus, and much of her recording career has gone into the theatre songbook, with albums built around Stephen Sondheim and the French composer Michel Legrand.
The screen work reads like what it is: the parts a working theatre lead takes between contracts. Central Park West put her in a primetime soap in 1995. Frequency gave her the widest audience of any of her film roles, as Samantha Thomas in the ham radio time slip drama that has quietly outlived most of its competition from 2000. After that came a spread of smaller parts, Andrea in Life or Something Like It, Miss Silken in Loverboy, a music teacher in On the Rocks, plus a stint as Laurel on Miss Match.
Period material suits her best, and The Knick is the proof: playing Catherine Christiansen in a turn of the century New York hospital drama, she gets to use diction that sounds spoken rather than recited, which is the direct benefit of a stage career.
She has also written for The New York Times in recent years and served on the National Endowment for the Arts, a rarer second act than the usual move into producing.
Movies (5)
TV (4)
Where to start with Melissa Errico
Frequency first, simply because it is the most widely seen thing on her screen list and the ham radio premise still works better than it has any right to.
Then The Knick, where the period setting plays to her training in a way none of the contemporary comedies do. After that it becomes a question of appetite: On the Rocks and Life or Something Like It are appearances inside bigger films, Central Park West is the 1990s primetime soap curio, and Miss Match the network romantic comedy.
Worth saying plainly: her Broadway roles and her Sondheim and Legrand records are the real body of work here, and the screen credits are the sideline. Start with Frequency, then go and listen to the albums.