INGENUE - Suggestive word used by middle-aged Americans of the type associated with dyed hair and mid-life crisis, to describe young actresses notable for their looks rather than ability. Also used by my biographer, NINA KELLY, in referring to herself. It's over twenty years since I first encountered Nina, although even then I remembered her from her previous career as an actress. Anybody who watched the first series of the 1970's detective series Dirty Secrets might remember her portrayal of Detective Katie Wilson. In the opening credits she pursues a large, bald headed miscreant, her face rigid with concentration and arms extended on either side, as if the expanse of pavement was a high wire. Every time I watch one of the show's very occasional reruns, I'm amazed by the folly by which Nina, a trust fund maintained flower-child, was cast as a streetwise cop. In retrospect, it's such an obvious blunder that it seems like an act of deliberate mischief perpetrated by one of her many personal enemies. Anybody else would have been humiliated, but Nina, apparently oblivious to the catastrophe of her performance, in her inevitable web-site attributes her replacement after a single series to political differences. Of course, the fact of being woefully miscast shouldn't necessarily entail the destruction of an actor's entire career. One might wonder why she never resurfaced in less significant roles more in keeping with her talents. Nina would have made a perfectly adequate barmaid or prostitute. As long as the part didn't require any depth of understanding, I'm sure it would have been within her capabilities. She possesses, after all, the essential thespian traits of insincerity and over-reaction. I should really have no compunction in relating the exact circumstances of how she managed to render herself unemployable. She's hardly exercised restraint in relating her version of my history. The fact is that her subsequent banishment from the television studios was unrelated to her relative absence of talent. I won't, however, stoop to dealing in gossip. This isn't the place to trot out Nina's various personal crises. All that need interest us is what qualifications she might possess to write about me.

 

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