Happy Birthday, Melinda Clarke!

Melinda Clarke celebrates her 50th birthday today. Acting since she took up the role of Faith Taylor on the daytime soap opera Days of Our Lives in 1989, Ms. Clarke has been performing consistently through the years. She has exhibited a wide range of emotion, sometimes playing the heroine, or playing the villain in other roles.
Melinda may best be known to horror fans as the unwitting victim, however. Starring in 1993’s Return of the Living Dead III, Clarke played Julie Walker. Julie is the girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who Colonel Reynolds (Kent McCord) is determined to keep away from his impressionable teenage son, Curt (J. Trevor Edmond). An unfortunate incident changes things for the worse and transforms Melinda’s character into one of the undead. Determined to run away together, Curt takes Julie on the run, but their getaway is further complicated by Curt’s need to satiate Julie’s hunger for brains. No one ever said love was easy.

Return of the Living Dead III, Trimark Pictures

Another one of Melinda Clarke’s more memorable roles was that of Amanda in Nikita, the La Femme Nikita reboot. The series aired from 2010 through 2013. In just four seasons, Clarke took the role of the mid-level bureaucrat in a covert special ops organization and transformed her into a ruthless and sadistic villain. Clarke’s performances were nothing less than chilling, as she employed psychological manipulation to terrorize and torment her prey. Over the course of Nikita’s run, Melinda Clarke revealed her character’s own tormented past and how her past influenced the cold-blooded killer and power-hungry double agent she was to become.

Nikita, Warner Bros. Television

Melinda Clarke also made a memorable mark on the CW horror series, The Vampire Diaries. Although Clarke only appeared in a few episodes in the eight season run of The Vampire Diaries, she again took a seemingly two-dimensional character and gave her life. The character, Kelly Donovan, started out as an absentee mother, but soon proved she was far more devious than anyone realized.
In her final episode in the series, Melinda Clarke’s character revealed that she had been bitten and turned into a vampire long ago. Since that time, she had been working to help Katherine Pierce (Nina Dobrev) execute her latest villainous plot.

The Vampire Diaries, Warner Bros. Television

Coming up, Melinda Clarke will star in the made for TV movie, Enough About You. Clarke will play a decorator to the stars, whose own sense of self-importance overshadows her clients needs. Melinda’s ability to dive into any role and make it her own will undoubtedly make this a comedy to remember.

"I'm getting a lot of roles as women who are very powerful. I think that's a reflection of me as a person." - Melinda Clarke

Happy Birthday, Melinda!