Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 23, 1993 TAG: 9301230362
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JERRY BUCK ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SHERIDAN PLAYS GOOD-GUY HIT MAN IN NBC MOVIE
Jamey Sheridan, who set out to become a dancer before he injured a leg, got the bug to become an actor during an extended tour of Europe as a student."I still thought of myself as a dancer, although I had hurt myself," he says. "I met this woman doctor from Scotland, originally from Poland, who said I must be an actor because I read Shakespeare. She invited me to the Edinburgh Film festival. She put me up for a month and I saw all the pictures her brother had made in Poland. That's when I really decided to try acting."
Last year Sheridan returned to Italy to star in "Killer Rules," a sort of lethal love story that NBC will broadcast Sunday (at 9 p.m. on WSLS-Channel 10).
He plays a Rome-based mob hit man, masquerading as an investment adviser, who falls in love with another adviser played by Sela Ward. Also in love with her is a U.S. Justice Department investigator, played by Peter Dobson. The investigator, looking into his family background, discovers he and the hit man are brothers.
Sheridan is probably best known for his role as Philadelphia lawyer Jack Shannon on "Shannon's Deal," which ran on NBC in 1989-1991. He recently appeared in two feature films, "Whispers in the Dark" and "Stranger Among Us."
" `Killer Rules' to me is a kind of lark," he says. "It's almost James Bondish. The script had come across my desk several times in the past, and I wasn't really ready for it. But after `Whispers in the Dark' I found myself thinking about this story."
In the movie, Sheridan tries to break away from his adopted father, a Mafia don, and go into legitimate business. But his father says he must first prove his loyalty by killing a witness being protected by Dobson, the American agent.
"He is a guy caught in a tight place," Sheridan says. "He's trying to get away from the Mafia. Unfortunately, he turns out to have his mother's heart. The terrible irony is that he has to kill to get out of killing more. He is a man who could leap from the right side of his brain to the left without leaving any residue.
"He could be a complete sweetheart. He wasn't lying. It was like a split personality. But each time he kills someone in his mind he is killing his adoptive father."
On his return from Italy, Sheridan married Collette Kilroy, an actress he met at Yale University.
Sheridan was born in Los Angeles, the son of an Australian immigrant father and a mother from an old California family. He studied dance, theater and writing at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He planned to go into modern dancing until he was stopped by the leg injury.
"I took my time going to college," he says. "I took off to Europe and taught sailing in Sardinia for two months. I spent four months in Paris. I went to Scotland for a month, which is where I got the acting bug. Afterward, I spent the winter in Paris, then went to New York. I was offered a job with a dance group in France, but I showed them the scars on my knee.
"I was in `All My Sons' on Broadway with Richard Kiley. We started at the Longwharf Theater in New Haven, Conn. I did a couple of one-act comedy plays with John Goodman."
Sheridan says his two feature films, "Whispers in the Dark" and "Stranger Among Us," were "out and gone before you knew it."
He says he doesn't plan to do another series for a while.
"I haven't found anything I'm crazy about," he says. "I want to be crazy about my next project. Of course, when the money runs out, that'll change. I was pretty terrified of my show running five years. But when it ended I felt I hadn't gotten into it enough."
"A series is like a long run on Broadway. On the stage it's not until you've done the part about 80 times that it starts to sing. In the beginning you try to keep up. After a while it doesn't go fast enough."
Sheridan says that, like many actors, he is shy and builds a wall between himself and the audience.
"I don't see friends in the second row," he says. "In the theater you're in an illuminated space with the light coming in on you. Beyond that it's all blackness. You paint your own reality. When you work on film you see people standing around. That can hurt your concentration."