Ahead Of The Curve

GH’s Risa Dorken has spent a lifetime preparing for stardom.

- Mara Levinsky

Risa Dorken’s Hollywood story began in a decidedly unglamorous setting, one she describes as “really rural Minnesota — gravel roads, chickens in the yard.” She discovered her passion for performing when her mom enrolled her in dance class, hoping to help her high-energy 3-year-old channel some of her natural vivacity. When that exhausted its usefulness (“As I got older, girls got more flexible and taller and it just wasn’t a good fit for me”), the little girl who was reared on classic musicals like Meet Me In St. Louis switched her focus to voice lessons. “That’s when I really got the bug.”

Dorken convinced her mom to let her audition for community theater, and at the age of 8, she began doing professional work at the Minneapolis Children’s Theatre. After high school, she headed to Manhattan for a two-year conservatory program in musical theater — and experienced major culture shock when she landed in the tony Upper East Side, a neighborhood she chose “because it was all I knew based on SEX AND THE CITY.” Her first year was so rough, she almost didn’t return for a second one, but she got a pretty big reward for sticking it out: She met her future husband, Bo Clark (see sidebar), when he enrolled in the same school and she was assigned as his mentor. “I was just so drawn to him. We were both dating other people when school started — and two weeks after that, we were dating each other.”