Sunday, July 25, 1999 | 9:33 a.m.
If you've watched any television in the past decade chances are good you've seen Julie McCullough.
The petite blonde with girl-next-door good looks is a sitcom veteran of sorts, having starred in recurring and guest roles on such shows as "The Drew Carey Show," "Dave's World" and "The Golden Girls."
But it's the two years McCullough spent, from 1988-90, as part of the cast of ABC's hit series "Growing Pains" that continues to garner her the most attention.
Hey, aren't you ...?
Yes, she played a character (also named Julie) who began as the fictional Seaver family's nanny but quickly became the girlfriend of its eldest son, Mike, played by '80s teen idol Kirk Cameron. (TV veteran Alan Thicke, Joanna Kerns and Tracey Gold also stared on the show, as did a very young Leonardo DiCaprio in the years prior to the show's demise in the early '90s.)
Going from the small screen to a small stage, these days 34-year-old McCullough performs in the showroom at the San Remo hotel-casino as part of the the four-member cast of "Night Madness," a production show which recently debuted there.
The show also stars Las Vegas native Corinna Hanrey-Jones, the 1992 Playboy magazine Playmate of the Year, comedian Peter Pitofsky, who was previously part of a comedy duo that starred in New York-New York's defunct "MADhattan," and Scott Steindorff, who also co-wrote the show with John Macks, a writer for the "Tonight Show."
It's not the first time McCullough, also a former Playboy Playmate (1986), has taken to the stage: She's acted in several lesser-known plays in Los Angeles.
For the past dozen years between television gigs, she has performed in more than 6,000 shows around the country as part of the Larry Wilson and Company and Superheros of Comedy troupes, which specialize in vaudeville-type magic and comedy.
"Night Madness" is in a similar vein: It follows a couple, Johnny Magic (Steindorff) and Amy (Harney-Jones), as he reaches for stardom and she struggles to find happiness with him. Enter McCullough's character, Mystery Girl, a "mystical" character who teaches Amy how to keep her man interested.
"I try to blossom her into being a young woman," McCullough says. She helps the Amy character transform from "a little, conservative girl to tousling her hair and changing her wardrobe-wise so that she can keep the attention of her boyfriend."
McCullough describes the show as "very campy in the sense that we try to interact with the audience and get the audience to interact with us.
"Please don't come expecting a serious play, or a serious magic show, or a serious song-and-dance show," she says with a slight twang, a remnant of her teen years spent living with her family in Texas. "It's none of the above. ... It's over the top."
And it's "very different" than anything McCullough has done before, she says. "It's a little bit of magic and it's music and it's dancing."
But Steindorff had every confidence in McCullough. Having auditioned 30 females for the role, "I met her and instinctively knew she was perfect for the part," he says. "She's a great spirit. She's a phenomenal actress. It's a demanding role. Her character is a key role in the (show)."
The "Night Madness" job couldn't have come at a better time for McCullough, who had been living in Los Angeles. Her boyfriend, actor David Sutcliffe, recently relocated to Vancouver, British Columbia, where he's filming a new NBC series, "Cold Feet," which is scheduled to begin airing this fall.
"I thought, 'Well, I can sit around Los Angeles, maybe go up to visit (Sutcliff in) Vancouver, or I can go to Vegas and have a job,' " she says. (The couple's long-distance relationship means alternating weekend trips between Vancouver and Las Vegas.)
If there's one thing McCullough can appreciate, its being a working actress, especially because she's experienced firsthand on a couple of occasions the frustration of being out of work -- following her stint on "Growing Pains," for example.
"It was a dream job for me," she says. "Then, when the show was done, it was kind of a catch-22 for me because everyone knew me so well as that character, people didn't want to book me on other sitcoms.
"Most of the jobs that were available were to play some other teen idol's girlfriend or date. ... That happens to a lot of people when you do a television show and you are so pigeonholed into one character, they don't want to let go of that. So, at first, I didn't work after that."
Then the floodgates opened and McCullough signed on to the casts of not one, not two, but three television shows: the short-lived sitcom "Drexel's Class," starring Dabney Coleman, the slightly more successful program, "Harry and the Hendersons" (in a recurring role) and "ABC Live," a sketch comedy show that was canceled before it ever aired.
She also made "Round-Trip to Heaven," a "pretty bad" straight-to-video flick with former child star Corey Feldman. "The cast renamed it ... 'One-Way Ticket to Hell,' " she says.
McCullough passed on a regular role on "Harry and the Hendersons," opting for the part on "Drexel's Class," which was promptly canceled. "Then I basically wound up with nothing. ... That's sort of the way the business goes. You should always go with the bird in the hand and be careful what you wish for."
After another dry spell she filmed a "family, Christian movie" and a CBS pilot with actress Kate Jackson before signing on with producer Aaron Spelling for the series "Robin's Hoods," which was filmed in Vancouver and canceled after 22 episodes.
For much of 1995 McCullough was out of commission as the result of a traffic accident that nearly claimed her life, she says. The moving van she was driving back to California "slid off the road and tumbled pretty fast, pretty far." It took her a year to regain full use of her left hand and arm, which had to be reconstructed after the accident.
By the fall of that year she had landed a role on "The Drew Carey Show." She spent one television season playing Peaches, Carey's "redneck neighbor" with a "mile high" hairdo. "A lot of people didn't even know it was me," she says.
Then she went into syndication -- series, that is -- playing singer-turned-actor Rick Springfield's love interest on the show "High Tide," and also had a recurring role on the show "Pacific Blue."
All the while McCullough has appeared in smaller commercial, television and movies roles including one in the 1987 Roger Corman flick "Big Bad Mama II." "All that did for me was make me not want to do topless nudity in my career again and I have not since," she says.
Although she already had done it the year before when the former "Star Search" spokesmodel bared it all for Playboy magazine.
"That was a great experience, I have not complaints about it," she says about posing for the legendary magazine. "But I think as a young girl it builds so many impressions for you, so you have to do it, move on and make a career for yourself."
She points to the "education fund" that has been set up for former Playmates, many of whom, she says, have gone back to school after giving modeling and acting careers a go.
Posing for Playboy, she says, "has not helped me in my career at all. The only thing it did for me was it gave me enough money to move to Los Angles to pursue the acting and modeling side of the business."
But the perks, she admits, haven't been bad.
McCullough has been a frequent visitor to publisher Hugh Hefner's famed Playboy Mansion in the years since, attending Playmate reunions, conventions and what she calls "film education" nights: In the past Hefner has screened classic movies and arranged to have the film's director, producer or stars on hand to discuss them afterward.
And there were the legendary parties, typically attended by entertainers including singer Jerry Vale ("he's a regular" at the mansion, she says) and artist Leroy Neiman.
"You get to pick their brain," McCullough says, "because it's a very casual atmosphere there (and you're able to talk) about their writing, about their artwork, about their performances. The stories they tell, it's incredible."
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