People Weekly
June 1, 1998, Vol 49 NO. 21
Happy Washington attorney Pam Sherman leaped from practicing law to acting.
Lawyer Tried Acting, On Impulse
“I could never understand why the judge wouldn’t applaud,” says Sherman, acting up in D.C. and, above, in court in 1987.
Playing an attorney in a police interrogation scene for NBC’s Homicide last November, actress Pam Sherman voiced a few objections to the director. A real lawyer, she told him, would never allow a client to answer the scripted questions. His response? Overruled!
Sherman, 35, was plenty qualified to challenge the dialogue. Five years ago the native New Yorker traded her job as a Washington lawyer earning more than $100,000 a year for her childhood dream of acting. “It was like leaping off a building,” she says. “But I’ve never regretted it.” In fact, Sherman can’t remember a time when she didn’t long to perform. But her ob-gyn father and psychoanalyst mother had other ambitions for the youngest of their four children. They said, “Stick with academics. Acting is a nice hobby,” she says.
Sherman graduated from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in Manhattan in 1987 and landed a spot in a D.C. law firm. But when the firm dissolved in 1993, Sherman took her cue. Supported by her husband, marketing consultant Neal Sherman, 36, she quit law and enrolled in a summer acting course. “There was no turning back,” she says, even after earning a meager $5,000 in her first year on the stage.
Now the mother of 2-year old Zachary earns a steady income appearing in Shear Madness at the Kennedy Center and in the occasional T.V. series, where she doesn’t mind being typecast as an attorney. “Law financed my acting career,” she says. “And it beats waiting tables.”