She’s Making a Name

You can barely get the question out of your mouth before actress Harley Kozak shoots back the answer: “Yes, I was named after the motorcycle. But when I saw my name on the screen in ‘Parenthood,’ I missed having my middle name up there. So this is the last time you’ll see just Harley Kozak. It will now be Harley Jane Kozak.”

“Parenthood,” Ron Howard’s ensemble film about a multigenerational family, is Kozak’s fourth film, if you count her walk-on death scene in the grade-B 1981 horror film “House on Sorority Row.”

“I was the third co-ed murdered,” she says.

Kozak, who had been working her way through New York University School of the Arts, said her death in that movie breathed some life into her career and allowed her to give up waitressing. She has since appeared in “Clean and Sober” with Michael Keaton, and in Rob Reiner’s current hit “When Harry Met Sally . . . ,” in which she plays Billy Crystal’s ex-wife.

Originally from Lincoln, Neb., the 32-year-old Kozak spent eight years in New York. “I’ve been working on television and on stage for more than half my life, doing soaps and commercials too. I met Rob Reiner by reading for a pilot he did, but I didn’t get the job. But he remembered me and had me read for the part of Helen in ‘When Harry Met Sally. . . .’ ”

That role was cast by the same woman who did the casting for “Parenthood,” and it’s “Parenthood” that has garnered her the notices. “Yeah, I guess this was my big break. It was phenomenal working with such an ensemble cast. This could have been a nightmare, but no one was ever not helpful. I mean five minutes after meeting Mary Steenburgen and Eileen Ryan I was unburdening myself to them, and Dianne Wiest was like a sister to me (they are sisters in the film). I also think Ron Howard (who directed) is the nicest man in the business. He and the script writers were willing to listen to my thoughts on my character. Nothing was written in stone, but I had very few questions that weren’t already answered in the script.”

And how did a single woman deal with playing a mother?

“Oh, I’ve had some experience with kids. I have 13 nephews and nieces, with a 14th on the way.”