'Outlander' star had to unlearn her modeling skills 

PASADENA, Calif. - When Caitriona Balfe headed for L.A. to become an actress she\'d already spent 10 years as an international high fashion model. She had left home at 18, answering an invitation to Paris to shimmy down the runway.

But her dream was to be an actress, and modeling proved an impediment. "You pick up a lot of bad habits in the modeling world in comparison to acting," she says in a noisy restaurant here, the sound reverberating off the etched glass walls.

"Modeling is all about the \'poised\' look, everything you do has to look a certain way. Whereas in acting you can\'t care about what you look like. It\'s all about what you feel or what your intention is, or what the other person\'s intention is. You have to throw all that self-awareness out the window. I worked really hard and thank God it paid off."

It paid off in a massive way when she was cast as the time-traveling combat nurse who is thrust back to 18th century Scotland in the Starz smash hit, "Outlander," returning for a new season Saturday.

But Balfe was sweating over casting calls for two years before she snagged any kind of acting job. "I was lucky. Obviously from modeling I\'d saved quite a bit, so I was in that sense, I was very lucky. I could come here and I didn\'t have to wait tables or any of that. But straightaway I took classes and spent a year and a half just taking classes and just working on my craft and sort of learning."

Her very first acting job in L.A., found her playing a dead woman with no dialogue in J.J. Abrams\' "Super 8." Everything seemed rosy for a brief moment of time. But just before "Outlander," Balfe was unemployed for a hopeless stretch of time.

"That was really hard because you\'d get close on a few things, so that carrot\'s always dangling," she sighs.

"You\'d think, \'I\'m getting close so I must be doing something right, but I\'m not getting it. So what does that mean?\' When I first moved here I thought, \'Oh, that\'s fine. I\'m in a bubble of delusion that\'s how I\'m getting through all the rejections.\'

"But then you begin to wonder, are you really deluding yourself because so many people come here with the dream to work? But I knew that I was a hard worker and that I had something to bring to characters, and that it was something I loved to do. So I didn\'t have any desire for huge fame or anything like that. I just wanted to be a working actor. I\'m really glad it worked out."

Part of the reason it worked out is because the Irish Balfe (who pronounces her first name Katrina) admits she\'s stubborn. "Everyone in my family are hard workers, and we\'re all quite strong-willed," says Balfe, whois wearing a gathered skirt and a black blouse with ruffles down the placket.

"I think those are good qualities as long as you keep them in check. My dad\'s probably more stubborn than my mom, but my mom raised five children. And by the time my little brother was 5 or 6, my parents became foster parents. There\'s always been so many kids in our house. I have a foster brother and sister who came to us when they were 1 and 2 and they\'re now 26 and 27. Both my parents are hard workers," she adds.

"My father was a police sergeant and he worked very hard and. . . we didn\'t grow up with loads of money or anything like that, but they always worked very hard to give us whatever we needed."

Being No. 4 of five kids, she says she was always vying for attention. "But also it generates a lot of independence. . . so you\'re very self-sufficient in that sense. I left home at 17, went to college. After a year, I moved to Paris then lived in Japan, Germany, Italy, France, and you have to rely on yourself a lot."

Unmarried, she says she\'d like to have a family someday. "I think it puts things in perspective and keeps you grounded. My sisters manage it and they\'re both an inspiration to me. They\'re very successful career women. My one sister is manager of human relations in Hong Kong. The other one is a quality manager at a pharmaceuticals company in Dublin."

Balfe, 38, won\'t say whether she has a boyfriend or not, but insists she doesn\'t date actors. "I haven\'t and I won\'t. I have friends who are fantastic actors, but I think two people in a relationship who have this up-and-down career, for me it wouldn\'t work. That\'s not to take away from lovely actor men. Being handsome is fine, but don\'t marry somebody who has to make money off their handsomeness."

Annie Lennox, who sold 75 million albums when she and Dave Stewart constituted the Eurythmics, is back in the spotlight on "Great Performances." Lennox will present a concert of jazz and blues songs from her latest album, "Nostalgia," when she appears Friday on PBS. (check local listings). Lennox tells me that even though there were tough times, she could never give up.

"I didn\'t feel I had a choice, because if you are passionate about making music and being an artist and . . . also I wanted to express myself," she says. "It wasn\'t just, \'We\'re going to make some entertaining pop songs.\' I really had a burning. Especially as a younger person, I was burning to express myself. And it is like a real roller-coaster ride, and it was very challenging. And it was difficult when you weren\'t making something happen. And it was difficult when you were, because it just kept having different sorts of challenges," she says.

"And now the world is filled with celebrity, and it\'s a whole other value. And . . . I feel myself sort of lumped into celebrity, and I don\'t feel comfortable in that space. I feel myself as an artist and someone who communicates with people. The celebrity bit has always made me cringe. And it\'s just amped up so much now. . . I\'m at odds with many, many things in the industry of music and fame and celebrity."

"Mad Men" is tuning up its swan song Sunday on AMC. And nobody is more upset about seeing it end than Don Draper himself, Jon Hamm.

"There\'s no version of this ending that is not super painful for me, and mostly it\'s because of these people," he indicates his fellow actors. "And this person," he points to the show\'s creator, Matthew Weiner.

"Because they\'ve been the single constant in my creative life for the last decade. So that\'s kind of tough. And, yeah, I will be happy when the shows air and I won\'t have to fake like I don\'t know how it ends or make up some ridiculous story about robots or zombies or something. But I will never be able to have this again, and that\'s a drag," he says.

"I certainly in 2006 would not have expected to be sitting here having the experience over the last 10 years or eight or nine years, whatever it is. So there\'s no version of it that I can imagine in my mind that would equal what actually happened. And not only creatively and what we got to do and what I got to do in playing this person, but tangentially, this amazing group of people that I got to get to know. . .

"It\'s become, for better and worse but mostly better, just a part of my life and a significant part of my life. So there\'s not a lot of jobs you can point to, at least in our world, that have that impact. So that was like a really weird trot down memory lane. It also really felt great because, at the end of the day, this experience has been unequivocally wonderful, and I\'ll miss it."

To cynical Hollywood\'s surprise "The Bible," produced by Mark Burnett ("Survivor") and his wife, Roma Downey ("Touched by an Angel,") two years ago proved a massive hit. The pair of executive producers are back on Easter Sunday with "A.D. The Bible Continues" airing on NBC. "I\'ve never felt opposition, even from day one, five, six years ago, pitching the initial idea of doing \'The Bible,\'" says Burnett.

"I mean, I felt some people in the initial five years ago wondering, \'Is anyone really going to want to watch biblical stuff on primetime TV?\' And clearly we were right that we thought they would. It\'s gone on from there."

Following the History Channel\'s series, the couple made a film of the same subject, which earned $61 million at the box office, says Burnett. "And here we have \'A.D.\' on a major American network. . . People are really excited."

Easter Sunday is the ideal day to broadcast the continuation of the drama, says Downey. "We just know that there\'s a hunger for this kind of material. People are hungry for stories of faith. People are hungry for hope. \'A.D.\' is a great big feast that we believe will satiate that hunger."

(Luaine Lee is a California-based correspondent who covers entertainment for Tribune News Service.)

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