Dahlia Salem
Dahlia Salem is an actor, born 1971.
Dahlia Salem trained properly and then worked in daytime, a more demanding combination than it sounds. Born in New York in 1971 and doing impressions of family friends by the age of six, she studied at Boston University with a run of college productions behind her, including a role in R.U.R. that earned an Irene Ryan Award nomination, then spent two years at the Circle in the Square Theatre Conservatory. Her Broadway debut was as an understudy in The Rose Tattoo, and her stage work includes a reading of Strindberg opposite Al Pacino.
The bulk of the career after that was daytime serial television, Sofia Carlino on Another World and Claire Walsh on General Hospital, which is where conservatory training either survives or gets ground down. Daytime demands pages of dialogue a day and offers almost no rehearsal, so the actors who last are the ones with technique to fall back on.
The prime-time and film credits are the smaller half. She was Sabrina Hamilton in the western series Peacemakers, appeared under her own name in The Nines, and turned up as a mother in Paul Blart: Mall Cop. It is a career that looks modest on a filmography page and rather substantial once you count episodes.
Movies (4)
TV (2)
Where to start with Dahlia Salem
The prime-time work peaks with Peacemakers, a short-lived nineteenth-century western with a forensic streak, and Sabrina Hamilton gives Salem more to play than any of the film credits do. Start there.
Then The Nines, a genuinely odd film in three parts in which she appears under her own name; it is the credit most likely to surprise you, and the picture is worth seeking out on its own merits. Paul Blart: Mall Cop and Love Finds A Home mark the mainstream ends of the spectrum, one broad comedy, one gentle period romance, both small. The Naked Director uses her as a voice, Kayo.
Her daytime work, the Another World and General Hospital runs that account for most of her screen hours, is not among the credits listed here.