Childbirth one month, widowhood the next.
Between her regular job on "Northern Exposure" and her feature film starring debut, Cynthia Geary is enjoying back-to-back opportunities most actresses only dream of.As Shelley Tambo, the onetime beauty queen married to a bar owner more than three times her age on "Northern Exposure," Geary had a child on an episode earlier this season. And in the film "8 Seconds," which opened recently, Geary plays Kellie Frost, cowgirl wife of Lane Frost, the real-life rodeo star who was fatally gored five years ago at age 25.
"I think it's great, because one of the reasons I chose the role of Kellie Frost was because it's so different from the character I play on television," said Geary, a tall, slim, chatty blond with a ready smile.
"Kellie is a reactive character in the sense that she's very contained. Most of the things she does are reactions to things that happen to her - she's passive.
"Shelley is the opposite. Shelley does what Shelley wants to do and says what Shelley wants to say and is never inhibited. The thought of having to edit what she says, or think about what somebody's going to think about her, never crosses her mind, so I think they're almost two totally different characters. . . .
"So yeah, I think it was great that I'm doing a lot on `Northern Exposure' at the same time, so people can make a comparison and say, `Wow, she must be acting.' "
Geary received coaching for "8 Seconds" from the real Kellie Frost (now remarried), who served as a consultant.
"She's my age, she's 28. She's having a baby. She's an extraordinary woman, and I got to be really good friends with her," said Geary, who even rode some of Frost's horses in the film.
Geary is not the only small-screen performer headlining "8 Seconds." Luke Perry, the teen heartthrob of "Beverly Hills, 90210," stars as Lane Frost.
Seated in her publicist's Beverly Hills office, Geary laughs when asked how Perry stacked up against John McCallum, her senior-citizen spouse in "Northern Exposure."
"Everybody's got to ask that," she said. "Luke is a doll in person. He's very down to earth. He's a really nice, sweet guy."
But is he sexy?
"Well, you know what? Doing romantic scenes is so unromantic anyway, when you're on the set. I mean, it's not very romantic. You have to act. I would think you'd have to act even if it was someone that you were in a relationship with. . . .
"The one scene where Luke and I are in bed together, we'd known each other for four days. It was the first day of filming. It was raining, so they ran in and said, `OK, let's do this scene, let's throw it in this room.' It was the wrong set, the bed was too short, my head was hanging off, I had an A.D. (assistant director) holding my head up from the back, it's burning up and we're sweating.
"It's really, really unromantic, so I have no idea if he's a romantic guy or not. I don't know. But he's certainly a great guy in person, and I like him. As far as John Callum, for me, I'm lucky that I felt really comfortable with both of them."
Lucky is a word that Geary uses often in talking about her career, perhaps because she has one of those classic Hollywood discovery stories. She was waiting tables in a Mexican restaurant when a customer who turned out to be a high-powered personal manager gave her a card and told her to call. Within three months she was reading for "Northern Exposure."
Of course, luck had little to do with the years of training that predated the encounter with the woman (who is still her manager). Youngest of four children of a Jackson, Miss., money manager, Geary studied voice at an early age with her mother, a music teacher, and majored in vocal performance at the University of Mississippi, practicing a repertoire of opera and classics. (She still takes voice lessons and is considering putting together a club act in between filming "Northern Exposure" up in Seattle.)
Hoping to break into musical comedy, Geary transferred to UCLA her final year of college, began taking acting classes on the side, "and really fell in love with acting and decided that I wanted to get into it full time." Still, it was three years before "Northern Exposure" came along, during which time Geary did the usual assortment of commercials, tiny TV and movie roles while waitressing to make ends meet.
Geary lives in Seattle with boyfriend Robert Coron, in the home she bought a few years ago, about the time CBS made a 50-episode commitment to "Northern Exposure."
"We shoot 10 months a year," she explained. "I used to keep an apartment in Los Angeles, but I gave it up because I hadn't been there in three years."
Four years into the series, Geary said she still finds "Northern Exposure" a challenge.
"Luckily, we have such wonderful writers that I keep getting to do new things, especially with the pregnancy thing," said Geary, adding that before the make-believe delivery she was so terrified of childbirth that she refused to attend a real delivery to bone up for her performance.
"I am still scared to death of childbirth. I can't walk through a hospital hall. I hate blood, I hate pain. I would be a horrible nurse. I run the other way if someone gets hurt. But it changed my attitude because it was very moving.
"The show where I had my baby, the birth scene - it sounds corny, but I cried, the crew cried, the cast cried. It was really like I'd kind of had a baby."