Lisa Jane Persky

Pliable second lead and supporting player of numerous films and TV programs since 1979, Lisa Jane Persky made an auspicious debut as Mary Ann Meechum, the rebellious, oft-cynical eldest daughter of Robert Duvall in "The Great Santini" in 1979, but few of her subsequent roles have been as "showy." Persky's stage credits Off Broadway began with work at the famed La Mama Experimental Theatre Company in "Grandmother Is in the Strawberry Patch," and at the Truck & Warehouse Theatre in the campy production of "Women Behind Bars," an ensemble piece which also included Divine in drag amongst its cast. Persky has won critical acclaim in Los Angeles for many stage performances, as well as the Drama-Logue and L.A. Weekly awards for best actress for "These Men," which she starred in at LAATC (Los Angeles Actors Theatre Company), and for "Hearts on Fire" at the Odyssey. However, she is best known to a wider audience for "The Great Santini," as well as for other films such as "The Sure Thing" (1985), in which Persky and Tim Robbins were teamed as the couple determined to drive John Cusack nuts by singing every show tune possible as they drive cross country. More recently, she was a nervous medical student in the ensemble "Vital Signs" (1990), added her deadpan to the laughs in "Dead Funny" (1995). Persky has made numerous TV guest appearances and appeared in TV movies. She was Dirty Dee in the NBC TV movie, "KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park," which starred the then red hot rock group and aired in 1978, and in 1987 played the gum-cracking secretary Dottie Dworski on the short-lived "Private Eye" comedy series.