Holy crap! Phyllis was a St
Louis Cardinals cheerleader;
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/ent...7?OpenDocument
Phyllis went to Cleveland High School ... and now works at Dunder-Mifflin
By Gail Pennington
POST-DISPATCH TELEVISION CRITIC
05/10/2006
The Office -- NBC Series -- Pictured: (l-r) Angela Kinsey as Angela, Kate Flannery as Meredith, Steve Carell as Michael Scott, Phyllis Smith as Phyllis, Jenna Fischer as Pam Beesley
(NBC Photo: Paul Drinkwater )
Do you know Phyllis Smith?
Maybe you remember her from Cleveland High School, class of '67. These days, there's a better chance you know her as Phyllis on "The Office," the painfully funny comedy that, in its first full season, has turned into a real hit for NBC.
Adapted from the cult-favorite British series of the same name, "The Office" arrived in March 2005 for a limited run and performed well enough for NBC to pick it up for fall. Paired with "My Name Is Earl" and boosted by iTunes downloads, "The Office" took off and was rewarded with early renewal for next fall.
The highest-profile St. Louisan on the payroll of the fictional but all-too-realistic Dunder-Mifflin paper company is Jenna Fischer, a Nerinx Hall graduate who plays receptionist Pam Beasley. But Fischer is happy to share the spotlight; in fact, she was the first to suggest that fellow hometowner Smith had a good story to tell.
That turned out to be true - and how.
To look at Phyllis, an "Office" drone best-known for her deadpan double-takes, you might never suspect that Smith was a dancer with professional companies in St. Louis, a football Cardinals cheerleader, and a burlesque performer with Will B. Able and his Baggy Pants Revue at the Chase-Park Plaza in the 1970s. ("No stripping," Smith points out. "But I did wear feathers.")
She toured as a dancer, including a stint in a can-can review, until she injured her knee doing a jump split in the mid-1980s and had to quit. Staying in Los Angeles, she worked as a receptionist and took acting classes, but "I fell into a crack, that nebulous middle ground between old and young, pretty and ugly."
Answering a call for a mousy woman ("I didn't get it"), Smith got to know the casting director and became interested in the field. A year later, that same casting director hired her, and for more than a decade Smith worked in casting on shows such as "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman," where she spent six years.
The day that series wrapped, Smith signed on with another casting director, Allison Jones, and here's where the story gets bizarre. Jones cast NBC's version of "The Office," and part of Smith's job was to tape the auditions and to read with various actors.
Ken Kwapis, a movie and TV director (and Belleville native), was directing the "Office" pilot, and he kept asking Smith to read more roles. Big and small. Male and female. She read as Pam, she read as Jim and she read as Dwight, the obsequious second-in-command, played by Rainn Wilson.
According to executive producer Greg Daniels, that last one did the trick. "He told me later, 'We decided after you read Dwight,'" Smith says.
Nobody ever officially asked Smith to be in the show, however.
"I didn't believe it until a fax came through listing one of the characters as 'Phyllis, who has a background in burlesque,'" she says.
Jones, her boss, read it and said, "Is this MY Phyllis?" Then she kindly agreed to let Smith - still a bit stunned at this point - return to her job if the show didn't pan out.
Since then, Smith has enjoyed every minute on the set of "The Office," which is shot documentary style with some improvisation.
"There's not one ego in the whole group," she says, citing star Steve Carell as "the nicest person you can imagine" and the rest of the cast as so pleasant "the crew actually wants to be around us. The only problem is keeping a straight face."
The best gift she got this year wasn't even the early renewal but the announcement just before Christmas that all of the show's supporting players, some of whom still felt like background at that point, were being made regulars.
Being a regular means not just a steady paycheck but also the summer hiatus off, with no scrambling for jobs. Smith is using it for a long visit with her parents in St. Louis. Loy and Glenda Smith, who still live in the Carondelet neighborhood where Phyllis grew up, "are enjoying this so much. The joy this has brought to them has been the best thing about it for me."
The success still sometimes feels like a fantasy, she says.
"If you'd told me two years ago that I'd be here being interviewed, I'd never have believed it," she says.
More and more often these days, though, she's recognized.
"Never in St. Louis, except once at a Steak 'n Shake," Smith says. "But in California, I'm recognized every day now."
Kids on skateboards shout and wave. Joggers tell her, "Hey! I have you on my iPod." And once, at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, "a very polite man asked me, 'By any chance, do you work at Dunder-Mifflin?'"
"I really do believe there's a divine plan," Smith says. "Every piece of the puzzle has fit together to put me where I am. This is really an example of God working in a mysterious way."
What we know about Phyllis (the Dunder-Mifflin employee on "The Office")
She's played by St. Louisan Phyllis Smith.
She's good at her job (selling paper). In the annual Dunder-Mifflin performance review, she ranked second.
She can play basketball and owns a sports bra.
She knits. In the Christmas episode, her "secret Santa" gift was a hand-knitted oven mitt. She wound up with a set of shot glasses meant for someone else.
She has a boyfriend, Jim Vance, who's in refrigeration and who sent her flowers on Valentine's Day.
"She's happy," Smith says. "Happier than most of those people."
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