From: susanm@hp-and.an.hp.com (Susan Margulies)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv.soaps
Subject: AMC: Tonya Pinkins in People Mag
Date: 14 Sep 92 13:27:39 GMT

Well, due to multiple power outages here over the weekend, I can't
access the stuff I need to get to work right now!  So what better 
to do than type in that article I promised you guys last week!
Enjoy,
Susan

table of contents blurb:
Doubling up as a lovely lawyer on TV's "All My Children" and a jazzy
lover in Broadway's "Jelly's Last Jam," Tonya Pinkins is one hot
number

article, pp. 70-71

"Star of Stage and Steam"

Sexy Tonya Pinkins heats up Broadway and the soaps, but her No. 1
role is just Mom

One look at Tonya Pinkin's life these days and you wonder how she's
avoided an identity crisis.  She starts out at 5:30AM in her
Manhattan Loft, having breakfast with her two young children.  At
7:30 she's in fictional Pine Valley on the set of the AMC soap "All
My Children," where she plays single, street-smart attorney Livia
Frye.  Then come dinner and bathing the kids before she heads to
Broadway and becomes Sweet Anita, jazz great Jelly Morton's red-hot
lover in the hit musical "Jelly's Last Jam."

So many roles, so little time - but Pinkins, 30, isn't complaining.
"I have all this energy that needs to be doing something," she says.
And plenty of people are taking notice.  Livia's interacial romance
with businessman Tom Cudahy has steamed up daytime TV.  And Sweet
Anita's sass and songs won her a recent Tony Award for best featured
actress.  Says Pinkins, "I feel like I'm having a moment of grace."


The daughter of a former Chicago policeman and a bus driver, Pinkins
wasn't even a year old when her parents separated; thereafter she
lived alternately with her mother and paternal grandmother.  She
began acting classes at 9 and by 14 had done commercials for Coke
and McDonald's.  Pinkins won a full scholarship to Yale but instead
chose Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh, where she could major in
theater, music and dance.  But after landing a role on Broadway in
the Stephen Sondheim musical "Merrily We Roll Along," she left
college at 19 and moved to New York City.

There were dry spells, and years of regional theater.  In 1983 she
got a part in "As The World Turns," where she became friends with
fellow soaper Meg Ryan.  Unhappy with her character, Pinkins quit in
1986 and shortly after married Ron Brawer, 49, the music director of
"Another World."  They have two sons - Maxx, 4, and Myles, 2.

Pinkins first played Sweet Anita in the 1991 Los Angeles production
of "Jelly"; as it was ending, she got the part of Livia.  "To do
'All My Children,'" she says, "that's making it."  When "Jelly"
moved to Broadway, the soap's producers agreed to work around her
theater schedule.  She has grown close and comfy with her TV family.
"We hang out all day and solve the problems of the world," she says.
By contrast, she and "Jelly's" busy star, Gregory Hines, "literally
meet onstage."

Pinkins like to spend what spare time she has reading works by black
women writers, particularly Toni Morrison and Gloria Naylor.  She
also raises funds for the Children's Brain Tumor Foundation, which
she helped found in 1989 after a 5-year-old cousin died of brain
cancer.  Deluged with offers since her Tony Award, she recently
signed a deal to play an FBI agent in an HBO movie, "Strapped,"
which will be shown next year.  Ultimately she's shooting for
nothing less than big-screen superstardom.  "I have to shake anybody
who tells me that hasn't happened to a black woman," she says.  "I
say, 'Well, it hasn't happened *yet*.'"

Pictures:  2 great pictures of Pinkins as sweet Anita (lots o'
clevage here, folks!)

Caption: Pinkin's love scenes with "Jelly" costar Gregory Hines,
said New York Times critic Frank Rich, "[aim] for a new adult
standard in male-female encounters."

Reprinted without permission, People Magazine, September 14, 1992.

--
Susan E. Margulies       |  So many bad drivers,
HP Imaging Systems       |  so few hand gestures.
508-681-2153 (work)      |      o o 
susanm@hp-and.an.hp.com  |     \___/
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv.soaps