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Joanna Kerns

This tall, blonde actress went from being the journalist mother on the ABC sitcom "Growing Pains" to becoming one of the queens of TV-movies in the 1990s. Joanna Kerns began her career as a dancer and gymnast and turned to acting after realizing that a chorine's career is short and if she wanted to be in show business, she had better learn how to act. As such, Kerns, then billed as Joanna de Varona danced in "Clown Around," a show which closed before reaching Broadway, and at Disneyland, before being cast in the touring company of John Guare's musicalization of Shakespeare's "Two Gentlemen of Verona." Kerns then moved to New York where she studied acting with Lee Strasberg and was cast in several small parts in the Broadway production of "Ulysses in Nighttown" (1974). She also was successful in TV commercials--at one point she had an extraordinary 18 national spots running simultaneously. But although Kerns would later direct an L.A. stage production of "What Every Woman Knows" (1989), her New York period of study was just a preamble to her career in TV, and to a lesser extent, in films