Slightly OT: Emily's mom Mary Jo
I just saw an episode of the 1968-70 series Here Come the Brides on the Antenna Network yesterday, and one of the guest actors was a young lady with black hair and pale blue eyes who looked vaguely familiar. The character was supposed to be just under 21 and the actress looked the right age for the part, placing her birth year in the mid to late 1940s. I couldn't figure out where I knew her from, and her name as listed in the credits, "Mary Jo Kennedy", didn't ring a bell (other than the fact that this episode was filmed the year before another young woman named Mary Jo drowned in a car that a certain senator named Kennedy drove off a bridge in Marthas Vineyard, Massachusetts).
A search here on IMDb turned up the following actress:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0448213/
Her acting credits listed one theatrical movie and six other guest appearances in TV series episodes besides Here Come the Brides from 1967 to 1970, plus a guest appearance in a 1990 episode of the series Shannon's Deal. Still didn't ring any bells, but then I looked in her Bio section and it noted that "Mary Jo Kennedy" was a stage name for a woman born Mary Jo Weir. Then I remembered reading that Mary Jo Weir was also the maiden name of Mary Jo Deschanel, whose year of birth is listed as 1945 and whose earliest acting credit on IMDb is in The Right Stuff in 1983.
I replayed the Here Come the Brides episode, and sure enough, it was her! The reason she'd looked so familiar to me was not as much because she looked like herself in later appearances in The Right Stuff and The Patriot (although the resemblance is certainly still there), but more because from certain angles with certain facial expressions, she looked almost exactly like her daughter Zooey (Emily's little sister) does now.
Let me caveat this with my mentioning that I have a certain pet peeve over some idiot who submitted to IMDb that Harry Morgan of M*A*S*H fame appeared in the movie Patton because there was a brief appearance in a newsreel of a senator, played by an actor whose voice sounded similar to Morgan's but who otherwise bore only a superficial resemblance to him. I've been trying to get IMDb to correct that for months, but Morgan's name now appears indelibly listed in the credits for Patton.
In the remote chance that I'm wrong, I'm not sure we should merge the two credit lists under the name of Mary Jo Deschanel, lest I commit the same error as the person who did the Harry Morgan error. But I'm almost 100% positive on this one, and if I'm wrong, the same birth name, age range and resemblance has to be one of the strangest coincidences in Hollywood.
Is there anyone out there who can give independent verification of my discovery?