Poppy Montgomery has a sharp perspective on Samantha Spade, the FBI agent she portrays on CBS’ “Without a Trace.”
“She’s very driven,” says the Australian-born actress. “She loves what she does. And she’s sleeping with everyone in the office, apparently.”
At the moment, Sam is caught between two lovers–her married boss Jack (Anthony LaPaglia) and younger associate Martin (Eric Close). Viewers, it seems, like a little romance with their procedural. In its third season, “Without a Trace” is beating the once-dominant “ER” so handily at 9 p.m. Thursdays that even repeats of the missing-persons drama, which ranks No. 7 in the ratings with an average viewership of 19 million, outperform original episodes of NBC’s hospital warhorse.
Montgomery has a lot in common with her character: Both are borderline workaholics who found romance in the workplace.
Like Sam, she has hooked up with a co-worker. “I met my boyfriend on the job because we played husband and wife in a film,” she says.
The initials of Adam Kaufman, her co-star in “Between,” a 2004 independent film, are prominently tattooed on her wrist.
One reason she likes to stay busy is the feast-or-famine nature of show business. And before “Trace,” Montgomery endured some very lean years.
She was born Poppy Petal Donahue in Sydney to parents who took a floral approach to naming their daughters. “I hated my name, I mean really hated it, until I was about 15,” she says.
Perhaps it was that simmering resentment that made her a rebellious student. She was thrown out of six private academies, quitting school entirely before she was 15 to pursue stage acting.
“I didn’t want to conform,” she says. Yet years later, when she adopted a stage name, she held onto Poppy and switched to her mother’s maiden name.
She came to the U.S. at age 18 because she couldn’t live without a boy from Florida she had met when he was an exchange student Down Under. “After five days in Sarasota, I realized I couldn’t stand him,” she says.
Montgomery took a bus to Los Angeles and began determinedly working her way up the acting ladder to network series regular.
Unfortunately, those series–ABC’s “Relativity,” UPN’s “The Beat” and the WB’s “Glory Days”–“all lasted like half of a first season. Not even a blip on the radar.”
Her breakthrough came in the 2001 miniseries “Blonde,” based on Joyce Carol Oates’ novel about Marilyn Monroe. Still, it took some convincing before CBS would agree to let a relative unknown–a foreigner at that–play a U.S. icon.
“We really had to sell her to CBS because no one knew who she was,” says “Blonde’s” director, Joyce Chopra. “CBS was highly aware of her after that performance.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
