Kelli O'Hara
Kelli O'Hara
Kelli Christine O'Hara is an American actress and singer. She has appeared on Broadway and Off-Broadway in many musicals since making her Broadway debut as a replacement in Jekyll & Hyde in 2000. A six-time Tony Award nominee, her first nomination was for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for the 2005 production of The Light in the Piazza. Her subsequent nominations were for The Pajama Game, South Pacific, Nice Work If You Can Get Itand The Bridges of Madison...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionStage Actress
Date of Birth16 April 1976
CityElk City, OK
CountryUnited States of America
I've always wanted to do a Shakespeare play.
Everyone's story is different, and we can't really be inside them.
I don't ever sing classically when I am singing a contemporary score - I kind of try to fit in whatever needs to happen.
Shakespeare has great ability to skirt around a subject and portray human nature.
My great-grandfather, Peter O'Hara, was born in Ireland, I believe, in County Clare. His father, my great-great-grandfather, had actually come to America a generation before when times were very bad in Ireland. He worked in the Pennsylvania area and did well with horses and farming.
I'm a mother, and when you have children, there's a protection. You'll do a lot to protect them, to do what's best for them.
With a revival, you're compared to somebody else.
It's really important that I have a personal life.
It's always hard - it's a little counterintuitive to leave your baby at any point during the infancy.
When I've done TV and film, when it's offered to me, I loved doing it, and I would do it again, but the ins and outs of auditioning is - that's time away from my kids.
To play a character is to inhabit the world and the life of that character.
We didn't have a lot of live theater in Oklahoma. I didn't visit New York when I was growing up. I watched movie musicals, and I believed in an idealistic, idyllic version of Broadway.
When I was a kid, I would sing in people's living rooms and for different little family things.
There is such a cliche to certain roles that all I can do is to try to make them realistic and work for the times, and so the audience actually won't see me as a caricature of something, but rather as an actual person.