Maureen Teefy plays the girl who has not yet decided she is allowed to be there, and in Fame she does it so plainly that it hurts. The cinema never found her another part worth the trouble.
Fi1m perspective
The first thing anyone sees of Maureen Teefy is an audition going wrong in a particular way. Doris Finsecker stands up to sing for the High School of Performing Arts in Fame (1980) while her mother, played by Tresa Hughes, conducts from the seats. Teefy does not sing it as a song. Nobody had asked her whether she could sing, she said later, "so it turned into an 'acting' song", and that is exactly how it plays: a girl getting through a piece of music because the alternative is going home with her mother. We were embarrassed for her, and then we noticed we were already on her side, which in a film with eight students to keep track of is no small thing to have managed in a minute of screen time.
Alan Parker cast her, by her own account, for her vulnerability, and it became the trade. She had come out of Juilliard the year before with a few small film parts behind her, a USO girl in Spielberg's 1941 (1979) among them, and after Fame the offers were for more of the same: the awkward or changing young woman in the corner of a youth musical. She was a Pink Lady, Sharon Cooper, in Grease 2 (1982) and Lucy Lane in Supergirl (1984). We have not reviewed either and will not pretend to a view on the performances, but they were supporting parts in films few people now recommend, and that is a thin return on an entrance like Doris's.
She turned down the Fame television series because she did not want to play the same part over and over, which is the decision of a stage actor rather than a screen one, and the rest of the career bears that out. Her last substantial film part was Wendy in Star Time (1992), a small psychological thriller directed by Alexander Cassini, and after the 1990s the work moved to the theatre: a one-woman autobiographical show, A Subject for a Short Story, with song and tap in it, a production of Hedda Gabler she directed, and a short in 2017 about Peg Entwistle.
What she could do, on the evidence we have, was make training invisible. Doris is a drama-school student who looks as if she has never acted in her life, played by someone with a conservatory and Juilliard behind her, and the gap never shows. What the films did not do was give her anyone to play once the shyness wore off. Watch the first half hour of Fame, where Gerry Hambling's cutting gives every student a few seconds to be somebody. Teefy is the one who looks as if she might not get in.
Biography
Maureen Teefy is an American actress. She was born on 26 October 1953 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She trained at the Minneapolis Children's Theater School, the Boston Conservatory and the Drama Division of the Juilliard School, and later studied with Larry Moss.
Teefy is known for her role as Doris Finsecker in the 1980 film Fame. Her other film credits include 1941 (1979) as a USO Girl, Grease 2 (1982) as Sharon Cooper, Supergirl (1984) as Lucy Lane, Sunset (1988) and Star Time (1992). She has also appeared in television productions and worked in theatre, including directing the play Hedda Gabler.
She was married to director Alexander Cassini from 1982 to 2006.
