Karen Leigh Sharp

Karen Leigh Sharp was born to a Tennessee Williams-esque emotionally unstable southern mother, Montine Powell (an orphan from Moultrie, Georgia), and to her fun-loving father, Robert Beckelhymer, from Chatsworth, California, an insurance underwriter, who brought the spark of play into their turbulent home life in San Jose, California. Karen's stage debut (at the age of 6) was the role of an emotionally unstable queen, where she accidentally became hooked on the acting drug while blurting out bottled up emotions of sadness, anger and humor, all of which set her free. From then on the theatre became a safe refuge to explore her authentic emotions. With acting in her blood, but no money for formal training, Karen's, first job was at a 6-screen drive-in movie theatre, hired to squirt soft drinks into cups from a hose at the snack bar. After her shift, she'd climb the scaffolding up to the marque to study actors on the big screen, eat free popcorn, and critique with the pigeons. Upon graduating college with a degree in theatre from CSU Fullerton, Karen, moved to Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas Avenue, instantly becoming a "struggling actor," who: carried a stun gun, worked as a waitress, was an extra in The Champ, got an under five acting job on General Hospital, went into credit card debt by writing, producing and acting in her own music short, The Lady Drives a Scamp, and where she and Blanche DuBois became soul mates in A Street Car Named Desire. While building her stage credits, Karen, enrolled in acting class with, Darryl Hickman, who keenly dubbed her a "tragic-clown." Like Stanislavsky, Darryl, taught his students to act from their souls saying, "You do not become the character, the character becomes you." Darryl became her acting mentor and good friend. In the late '80s Karen was invited by her uncle to bring Crimes of the Heart and 5 Los Angles actors to his dinner theatre in the Sierra Mountains of California. The young actors piled into the lime green Scamp and headed north. At the end of that summer, her friends went back to LA, but Karen and the Scamp stayed. Karen craved an emotionally stable family, so two daughters, Chelsea and Sophie and husband Greg Sharp manifested themselves on 20 blissful acres, while she continued to direct and act in award-winning regional theatre, location scouted for national television commercials, taught acting classes, earned a K-8 teaching credential, acted in short films, wrote a one-act children's play, Mary Brave Eyes (about white racism in rural America), and survived breast cancer. In 2018 she submitted a self-tape for the role of Silvia to Danish director Vibeke Muasya's film, Twisted. When Vibeke saw her head shot she said, "She has Liv Ullmann eyes, God, I hope she can act." Karen's heart of hearts has never wavered on accomplishing her life-long dream of landing a lead role in a feature film. Her wish now is to be offered her next deeply stirring role, that is living somewhere inside her soul.