Jenny O'Hara
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Jenny O'Hara is an actress who is part of a performing family whose influence encompasses regional and New York Theater from Warren, Pennsylvania to Greenwich Village, Broadway, and rock music from England to New York.
Born on February 24, 1942 in Sonora, California; her father, John B. O'Hara was a salesman and her mother, the former Edith Hopkins, was a journalist and drama teacher. Jenny, her singer/actress younger sister Jill O'Hara, and her singer/guitarist brother Jack O'Hara, grew up amid their mother's pursuit of a theatrical career, leading a gypsy-like existence in half-built houses and other accouterments of a struggling existence.
Edith O'Hara directed a children's theater in Warren, where the two daughters occasionally participated as actresses during their teens, though neither took it seriously. Jenny spent a year at Carnegie Tech and a summer playing in stock theater, and then came to New York to study with Lee Strasberg and Sanford Meisner.
O'Hara's biggest stage credit of the '60s was in the dramatic play Dylan opposite Alec Guinness as Annabelle Graham-Pike. In 1970, O'Hara succeeded her younger sister, Jill (who had been nominated for a Tony Award) in the musical Promises, Promises. By the mid-'70s, Edith O'Hara was running the 13th Street Theatre in Greenwich Village (a major venue for off-off-Broadway and children's theater), and her brother Jack was in London, playing guitar and bass and singing with the band Eggs Over Easy, pioneering the pub rock scene in England.
Meanwhile, Jenny had graduated to television, both in series and made-for-TV features, including starring roles in: Brink's: The Great Robbery, The Return of the World's Greatest Detective, Blind Ambition and Blinded by the Light.
She later worked in movies such as Career Opportunities, Mystic River, and Matchstick Men, and television series such as The Facts of Life, My Sister Sam, Law & Order, NYPD Blue, ER, and The King of Queens, where she plays Doug Heffernan (Kevin James)'s mother Janet Heffernan.
In real life, Jenny O'Hara is married to British-born American actor Nick Ullett (b. March 5, 1941), a cancer survivor.
