Courtesy Everett Collection
Patrick Cassidy and Melora Hardin on ‘Dirty Dancing’
Nobody puts Baby in a corner — and no one should put Melora Hardin there either!
The star of The Office, Transparent, 27 Dresses, The Bold Type, and, more recently, Dancing With the Stars sat down with Entertainment Weekly for a career-spanning interview in which she touched on her time leading the cast of Dirty Dancing. Not the beloved, 1987 romantic classic starring Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, but the series adaptation that followed the year after, in which Hardin stepped into Grey’s dancing shoes as Frances “Baby” Kellerman.
“It was so exciting,” Hardin recalls. “I mean, Kenny Ortega was not Kenny Ortega back then. He wasn’t the star that he is now, or the filmmaker that he’d become,” she says of the High School Musical director who in 1988 was coming off a prolific run choreographing films like Xanadu, St. Elmo’s Fire, and Pretty in Pink in the 1980s. Ortega also choreographed the Dirty Dancing film and was brought on to sketch out the moves for the series and ultimately directed two episodes.
“He was really a choreographer then, and he was just wonderful, so warm and so likable. So that was something amazing about the show, and we had a lot of fun,” Hardin continues, but, asking if she can be honest, the star notes that there was something about the production experience that “was actually frustrating for me.”
CBS
Melora Hardin as Frances ‘Baby’ Kellerman on ‘Dirty Dancing’
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“I wasn’t allowed to dance,” Hardin reveals. Laughing, she elaborates, “Oh, yeah. I had to pretend I couldn’t dance!”
Grey’s Baby Houseman couldn’t dance at the outset of the Dirty Dancing film, so neither could Hardin’s Baby Kellerman. (In one of the series’ few major alterations, Hardin’s Baby became the daughter of resort owner Max Kellerman, not guest Jake Houseman, as in the film.) But unlike Grey, Hardin was a trained dancer, having taken ballet classes since the time she was a girl.
And it wasn’t just Dirty Dancing.
“I couldn’t tell you how many times,” she says. “In Diff’rent Strokes, I had to pretend I couldn’t dance. In The Office, I pretend I couldn’t dance. Like, someone just let me!”
With relief, Hardin allows that she was, over time, afforded opportunities that allowed her to showcase the full extent of her prowess as a dancer.
“I did get to do that on Dancing With the Stars, and as Roxy on Broadway [in Chicago].” Still, Hardin says she would “love to do a musical movie. I haven’t gotten to do that yet, and I would love to be able to.”
The Office/YouTube
Melora Hardin as Jan Levinson on ‘The Office’
The Dirty Dancing TV series ended after just one season. It co-starred Patrick Cassidy of the renowned Cassidy show business family as the Johnny to Hardin’s Baby, as well as M*A*S*H star McLean Stevenson as Baby’s father, and future Bridesmaids director Paul Feig.
“Paul was one of my favorite actors on Dirty Dancing,” Hardin recalls. “He was so much fun, just a great actor and a nice guy. We really liked each other, and they kind of built that into the show, because we just had such a nice rapport.”
Feig also went on to direct Hardin in the infamous Office episode “Dinner Party.” Reflecting on another iconic episode of the beloved workplace sitcom, the surreal “Threat Level Midnight,” Hardin noted that “directors have to be there to support that and say, ‘That’s really landing, but let’s go in this direction. And Paul was totally up for that, and able to play that way.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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