FAMILY TRADITION - NOT EVER! CARRADINE KID HAD NO ACTING AMBITIONS UNTIL ...

BYLINE: Claire Bickley --
The family business of acting was not where Robert Carradine's daughter expected to end up. Not Ever.

It wasn't until Ever Carradine was far from her Hollywood home town and working toward a degree in anthropology that the bug finally bit.

"I didn't really see myself doing, like, field study in Papua, New Guinea. Uh-uh. So I had to re-evaluate my choice of majors," said Once and Again regular Ever Carradine, 25, whose unusual first name is just one of those '70s hippie parents things. (Her middle name is Dawn and she has friends named Collie and Sunshine.)

The answer to the what-to-do-instead question was as plain as her family tree. Her grandfather John, her father Robert, her uncles David and Keith and her cousin Martha Plimpton (Keith's daughter) were, or are, actors.

"Is it something that's learned or is it something that's inherited? I really don't know," she said on the phone from her L.A. home. "I'm such a different actress from everybody in my family that I don't know. I do a lot of television and I do a lot of comedy, and they're all very serious actors."

Well, except for her dad's best-known credits, those four Revenge of the Nerds flicks.

"It's really funny, and he was really funny in it. But oh my God, going to college after that - it was not easy."

It was deliberately distant - Lewis & Clark college in Portland, Oregon, from which she ultimately graduated with a degree in theatre.

"I think it's important to get out of where you're safe, and I was just sort of safe in L.A.," said Carradine, who was raised by her father from age four when he split with her mother, horse trainer's assistant Susan Snyder.

After college, Carradine made a guest appearance on Diagnosis Murder, then won recurring roles on the series Conrad Bloom as the title character's sister, on Veronica's Closet as airhead assistant Pepper and on Party of Five as Julia Salinger's romantic rival, Rosalie. She played a stripper in David Spade's 1999 comedy feature Lost & Found.

On Once and Again, she's Tiffany, the young girlfriend of lead Sela Ward's ex-husband, Jake. Earlier this season, it appeared as if Jake and Tiffany were headed for a split.

"I guess the fact that I just became a series regular sort of kills the mystery," Carradine said of that. "The plot will thicken. I don't know what I'm at liberty to say. But it's going to be good."

She'll be seen in the coming indie releases Lucky 13 and Ropewalk and is currently filming the Sarah Jessica Parker-Harry Connick Jr. comedy movie Life Without Dick in L.A.

"I play Sarah Jessica's best friend, sort of her mouthy, only-says-the-truth kind of best friend. You know how every girl's got to have one of those."

The truth of her chosen profession - that it has as many tough times as luxe times - wasn't something anyone had to tell her about. She'd seen it all her life.

"I feel lucky knowing exactly what I was getting into," she said. "Some years we'd have a great Christmas and get all kinds of cool presents. Then the next year, Christmas would be like four presents and I'd be like, 'What happened? Didn't you get a film this year, Dad?' "

When she announced she was going to be an actress after all, her father cried, worried that his little girl would face a similar struggle. So far, she hasn't. And these days, she can barely remember why she struggled against a career that now feels like such a natural fit. "Now I have a real sense of pride that I do the same thing that my family does, that I do the same thing that my father did. I think that's really neat."____The Edmonton Sun (January 15, 2001)