Tamara's Miscellaneous Tidbits......

Tamara's character "Alice" on Y&R seems to have started a new trend amongst the audience of fans which attend her personal appearances. While Alice and her mother Millie are not on the best of terms, the crowd is made up mostly of women and their mothers. Often, Tamara is even asked to say her trademark sayings, "Ma" and "old woman".



For a man in love, any occasion is deemed appropriate to display his affection towards the woman of his dreams. As Tamara recalls, when she was in college, she would receive a card every St Patrick's Day from a smitten admirer.



Best friends are hard to come by. Just ask Tamara who has experienced a rocky start with her own best friend Paulette. Seems the two couldn't stand each other and Paulette even suspected Tamara of dating her boyfriend behind her back. Now this is what I call a real life soap opera! Eventually, the two became roomates and the best of friends.



Y&R fans are not the only ones who were intimidated by Alice's harsh personality. Camryn Grimes who portrays "Cassie", Alice's adoptive daughter, would run away from Tamara screaming, "you're mean, Alice!". Luckily, since then, the two have been able to seperate fact from fiction and now get along very well. Camryn even compliments Tamara's performance during some of their scenes together.



According to Tamara, her most challenging role was the one of her character "Deena Farnham" on the gritty drama, "NYPD Blue". Considering the character is a crack addict prostitute, Tamara had to make her portrayal convincing and honest. As much as possible, Tamara brings her own personal elements to the role because she doesn't believe in imitating a character but rather relies on some of her traits to make the character believable. The language was another aspect Tamara had to learn to master, admitting that she could not understand most of the street slang that was used in the script.



Before becoming an actress, Tamara was employed as a nanny. This experience combined with her Y&R alter-ego, has helped to stir her maternal insincts as she hopes to have a daughter of her own someday.