a pair of paulas--pritchett and kelly, both of whom were introduced in playboy--are now fulfilling our predictions of stardom
When she first appeared in Playboy back in August 1969, Paula Kelly was singing and dancing in the national road-show production of a hip musical, Your Own Thing. She had also just completed her maiden film, Sweet Charity, in which she re-created her award-winning stage role as a hard-boiled taxi dancer. Paula told us then that she'd like to do more acting and less hoofing--a wish that appears to be coming true. To her dramatic credits--which include TV's Medical Center and The Young Lawyers, plus Hollywood's version of The Andromeda Strain--she now adds Top of the Heap, written, produced and directed by Christopher St. John, who played a militant Harlem leader in Shaft. Paula is cast as a night-club performer who's being kept by St. John. Although it's primarily a dramatic role, she's also called upon to display her considerable talents as a singer. New York--raised, Paula majored in voice at Manhattan's High School of Music and Art and switched to dance at Juilliard School of Music. An invitation to perform at the 1969 Academy Awards led to a saucy--and show-stealing--interpretation of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; subsequent TV gigs included the Dean Martin and Carol Burnett shows, and specials by Soupy Sales and Sammy Davis Jr. One day soon they may all be looking for spots on the Paula Kelly show.
"She's a very strange girl," say the people at MGM for whom Paula Pritchett works these days. "She disappears every now and then, and it's impossible to find her for weeks." At presstime, however, we located Paula in the midst of moving to L. A. from New York, where she spent seven years as a model with Eileen Ford's agency, specializing in offbeat TV commercials--often plugging as many as five products, usually beauty aids, per week: "I did them all, made a mint--you can't believe the residuals. Or how I spent them." A self-taught actress, Paula considers her dramatic career a fluke. It began in 1967 when she appeared in Conrad Rooks's phantasmagorial Chappaqua, and got a boost when Czechoslovakian director Jan Kadar, after two years of searching for the right actress, cast her in Adrift as a dream girl who is pulled from a river by a fisherman, then destroys him. Our reviewer, describing the movie, praised the "bewitching presence" of Miss Pritchett--who had made her Playboy debut in a December 1970 pictorial. In The Wrath of God, Paula plays a 17-year-old Indian girl, mute since the slaughter of her parents, who miraculously recovers her ability to speak, then helps end the rule of a Central American despot. Her part is a strong one and it will be anything but a miracle if it leads to a solid career for the elusive Paula P.
