A Cast of Two : Father-Daughter Acting Team Includes Daytime-Emmy Nominee, Dinner Theater Performer

Richard and Tricia Cast, father and daughter, each stepped onto a stage for the first time in 1975, at Saddleback College. Their lives haven’t been the same since.

Two years later, at 11, Tricia turned professional with a role on the “Bad News Bears” television series. Tonight, she’s up for a Best Young Actress Daytime Emmy for her continuing role as Nina Chancellor on “The Young and the Restless,” a part that already won her Soap Opera Digest’s Best Daytime Actress award earlier this year.

Meanwhile, Richard has left his job as an electrical engineer to perform regularly on what he calls the “citrus circuit” of Orange County dinner theaters and on TV, in commercials and as an extra.

Their lives had never been ordinary. When Tricia was 3, Richard quit his job in New York, sold the house and bought a Winnebago.

For more than two years, the family of nine (Tricia has one younger and five older siblings) was on the road, discovering America. They settled in Mission Viejo in 1972.

Richard got work at an aerospace plant. It was far from the greasepaint and bright lights, but the job required him to lecture occasionally so he “went to Saddleback College for a speech class,” he recalls. “My teacher suggested I take an acting class, and I loved it.”

Given the role of Dr. Bough in Saddleback’s production of Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” Richard volunteered six of his kids to play his onstage offspring. Tricia, as Dixie, had the only speaking part.

“Once we got Tricia on stage,” Richard says, “we couldn’t get her off.”

They performed together several times at the college, and at one point, Saddleback’s director of theater, Wynn Pearce, gave Tricia a significant role of her own, the lead in “The Bad Seed.”

“I remember being nervous,” Tricia says, “but smiling inside.”

Working with college students at such an early age didn’t bother her. On the contrary, she says she “never fit in socially at (her own) school. My father moved us into a wealthy area but we weren’t. I wasn’t dressed like other students. I felt comfortable when I went to Saddleback, very at home. The support was strong, the students helped me a lot, treating me as an equal.”

When Tricia decided she wanted to try the big time, Pearce contracted an agent friend. Tricia’s first professional audition won her the role of Amanda, opposite Jack Warden, in the “Bad News Bears” series.

“It was very exciting,” Tricia remembers. “The first time on the set, the camera seemed enormous. The extras knew more than I did (about television). I was overwhelmed. But the director made me feel, ‘I can do this.’ ”

Her work put a strain on the family. She and her father--who’d left the aerospace plant to work as her manager, chauffeur and confidante--were living five days a week in an apartment near the studio in Hollywood.

“It wasn’t easy on my mother or my brothers and sisters,” Tricia says. “But I never heard a word of jealousy or anger from any of my family.”

When the series ended, Tricia continued to land roles, in a succession of after-school specials and movies of the week. Then, at 18, she began a two-year run opposite Jason Bateman in the series “It’s Your Move.”

Stardom didn’t dazzle her, she says. “It felt real normal. The only time it didn’t feel normal was when I went to junior high, when the TV shows went on hiatus. Kids can be cruel to anyone they see as different. I didn’t feel different, but they teased me, such as ‘can I borrow $10,000?’

“One boy followed me around all the time pretending to film me. I’m not the thinnest actress and some teased me about my weight. Some kids didn’t want to be friends with me because they’d be taunted for knowing me.”

Going in and out of school didn’t help matters. Tricia finished high school with a tutor while working on “It’s Your Move.”

She credits her father with keeping her on the right track in an industry with a reputation for destroying many young actors and actresses. “I enjoyed acting,” she says. “Looking around me, 70% of the young actors weren’t there (because they loved) acting. They were there because of their parents.

“I worked as a partner with my father. He taught me to be a professional at a young age, to arrive 15 minutes early, to know my lines. He taught me not to take advantage of my position. I owe it to him that I didn’t take a left turn in life like some of the other young actors I saw. Not many of my contemporaries are acting now. Drugs, drinking, early pregnancy and emotional problems hurt them.”

Richard had put his own acting ambitions on hold while he worked with Tricia, but once she started “It’s Your Move,” he had more time. He performed in two TV pilots, but neither of them aired. Dinner theaters kept him busy, however. And then, in 1984, Richard and Tricia performed together again--back at Saddleback, in a production of “The Fantasticks” arranged by director Pearce.

They worked together again, in Hollywood this time, in a production of “The Diary of Anne Frank” that Pearce also directed. It got good reviews, ran six weeks and earned Tricia an award from Youth in Film, an organization that promotes family films and the recognition of young performers. “Our award for theater isn’t given every year,” says YIF president Maureen Dragone, “only when there is an outstanding performance.”

Around the same time, Richard and Tricia worked together on “The Young and the Restless.” She’d been in the cast since June of 1986, following a smaller role on “Santa Barbara.” Richard was visiting the “Young and Restless” set and, Tricia recalls, “a day player didn’t show up. I told the director, ‘My father can play this part.’ ”

The part was that of a derelict who accosted Nina, Tricia’s character. “The two of us could barely keep from laughing through the entire shooting,” Richard says.

After five years on the soap, Tricia says she is getting restless and would love to get involved with movies. Richard, meanwhile, at 56 is making only about half as much acting as he could as an engineer.

And with so many dinner theaters closing, he’s had to rely more and more on TV day work. He’s averaging one job a week, and “it’s strange,” he says. “You wait around all day to work for 15 seconds.” He also has a job teaching a class on how to get work in commercials.

He’s objective about his daughter’s greater success. “Tricia’s a lot better at it,” he says. “And a lot better looking, as well,” he adds with a chuckle. “But I’m happy with what I’m doing.”

He and his wife, Patricia, still live in Mission Viejo, in the same house they moved into back in ’72. And “she still wonders,” Richard says with a smile, “when I’m going to get a real job.”