Career in Television and Film
Kay Plato began taking Dana to auditions when she was very young. By the age of seven, Plato began doing television commercials, reportedly appearing in over 100 spots for companies as diverse as Kentucky Fried Chicken, Dole, and Atlantic Richfield. She claimed she was offered two highly sought-after movie roles: the part of possessed child Regan MacNeil in the 1973 film, The Exorcist, and the starring role in Louis Malle's 1978 film, Pretty Baby. According to Plato, her mother vetoed both jobs, either fearing Plato would be typecast, or subjected to unsavory subject matter. Exorcist author/screenwriter William Peter Blatty said in the book Former Child Stars: The Story of America's Least Wanted that he had "no such recollection" of Plato being offered the role.
Plato made her film debut in 1977 at the age of thirteen in Return to Boggy Creek. Other credits include California Suite, High School U.S.A. and Exorcist II: The Heretic.
Plato was a trained and accomplished figure skater. At one point she was training for a possible Olympic team spot. During this time she was spotted by a producer during a brief appearance on TV's The Gong Show. She won what would become her most famous acting role, that of Kimberly Drummond on Diff'rent Strokes. According to Plato, her mother decided she should cut back on her skating to focus on the role.
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Famous quotes containing the words career, television and/or film:
“I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had their career.”
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“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
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“Television does not dominate or insist, as movies do. It is not sensational, but taken for granted. Insistence would destroy it, for its message is so dire that it relies on being the background drone that counters silence. For most of us, it is something turned on and off as we would the light. It is a service, not a luxury or a thing of choice.”
—David Thomson, U.S. film historian. America in the Dark: The Impact of Hollywood Films on American Culture, ch. 8, William Morrow (1977)