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Barbara Niven at Home on Chesapeake
Shores |
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Barbara Niven is a lot of things, but if you were to ask her, she would
probably tell you that what she is most proud of is being a mother and a
grandmother. She waves that flag proudly and so she should. Barbara
Niven, the actress has appeared in more than one hundred feature films
and made for television movies. Her roles have been as diverse as
currently starring as Megan O’Brien on the Hallmark Channel’s wildly
popular Chesapeake Shores,
where she is the prodigal mother who returns home to her five adult
children and her ex Mick O’Brien or in her role as Delores Swensen,
mother to amateur sleuth Hannah Swensen played by Alison Sweeney in the
Murder, She Baked mystery
movies, also Hallmark productions and the middle-aged Rebecca Westridge
in Nicole Conn’s A Perfect Ending
with the late John Heard and Jessica Clark,
a story in which her character is trapped in a loveless marriage
and she falls in love with another woman.
While there is a part of every actor invested in every role that they
play or at least there should be if that role is to be performed well,
not every moviegoer or fan who sits in front of their television sets on
a Saturday or Sunday night gets an opportunity to discover who the real
person is behind the character. We invite you to spend a few minutes
with us as we chat with an incredible woman, who seems to find the
perfect balance between strength and kindness, while not being afraid to
lend her voice to causes she truly is passionate about such as, animal
rights, anti-bullying, human rights and helping others to realize their
dreams. As Barbara Niven so often likes to say, “Don’t stop five minutes
before the miracle happens.”
For those readers who are not familiar with
Chesapeake Shores,
now in its second season on the Hallmark Channel and in Canada appearing
on the W Network, we asked Barbara Niven to take a few moments and to
set the scene for us.
She says, “Chesapeake Shores
is on the Hallmark Channel, which first of all tells you that it is
positive programming that families can watch together. That is what
drives me so much towards the Hallmark Channel. It is funny because this
is my thirtieth anniversary of getting my Screen Actors Guild card and I
started thirty years ago on the Hallmark Hall of Fame with a movie
called Promise (1986,
and is credited as Barbara Alexander) with James Garner and James
Woods. I just think that I am so lucky that it has come back full circle
and I am on Hallmark again. It is basically who I am and I think there
are a lot more people like us who watch that than there are the people
who like the other kind of programming. I love watching the other shows
that are out there now too. I watched one episode of
The Game of Thrones and I
hear that it was the most violent one that they had. I had to turn it
off. I like reaching. I like stretching the envelope and I have done
that too, but darn it for my real life, especially in this kind of
stress filled atmosphere and universe that we are living in nowadays, I
love being able to turn on TV and having positive energy going on in the
background.
I was really drawn to this part. Bill Abbott who is the president and
CEO of Crown Media, which is over Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Movies
and Mysteries called me. He said I am reading this series of novels
called Chesapeake Shores and
the mother in it she reminds me of you. I think that you need to read
this, because maybe this is something that we need to do together. As he
was on the phone I got on my computer, I downloaded it instantly and I
started reading it. From the first moment I was drawn to the character
of Megan.
Niven says she was drawn to the character of Megan O’Brien, “Because she
is a fierce mother. I have been divorced before. I remember thinking,
because I was married to a very strong person when I was much younger
and I also had my daughter Jess, the marriage was just not working. I
wasn’t old enough at the time that I got married to be able to know what
I wanted in my life or who I really was, but the most amazing thing in
my life and still is until this day is being a mother.
When I ended up getting divorced I had no way to make money, I had no
place to go and I had enormous guilt for ruining this life. I put some
of the guilt on myself, which again Megan (in
Chesapeake Shores) did the
same thing. I ended up finding a place to live, finding roommates to
help, because again I had no money. I didn’t even take any child
support. I left him the house, the car and everything, but I had my
daughter. I (also) had my big acting dream. I moved away and somehow God
smiled upon me and somehow I made that work. I don’t know how it
happened.
That is another story and why I am so passionate about helping other
people now, but living their dreams as well. I am living proof that if I
can make this crazy acting dream happen, as a single mother at thirty in
Portland, Oregon anybody can make any dream happen.
You just have to work harder than anybody else and not give up
and not give up five minutes before your miracle. Just do a little bit
every day.
Getting back to Megan and the character, I just knew that I had to play
her, because in the original script she was portrayed as pretty much
black and white. Even the lines that would come through that I was
supposed to say, ‘I had to leave to save myself.’ I said no that is not
how a mother thinks. That is not what I thought when I got divorced and
that is not how Megan thought.
Almost any parent of divorce can relate to this. When you divorce,
obviously there has been a bad relationship for a while, maybe you have
been fighting. If you are not fighting out loud, at least there is a lot
of stress. You know your
children pick up on it and you don’t want to color your children’s lives
by that kind of fighting and arguing, because they always take it onto
themselves. When you leave you also have to think about the kids and you
had better not put your ex-spouse down, because that’s fifty percent of
their DNA. You have to do
everything to try to work together and to make it better for your kids.
That’s not easy, because you obviously have a whole bad history with an
ex and if you can’t communicate when you are married, how can you do it
right afterwards?”
Barbara Niven saw Megan O’Brien as being a woman who chose to leave her
marriage, so she could get help, to rediscover who she was, because she
lost her identity in being the mother to five children while, in her
words, “getting run over by a stronger personality.”
“It is not that he (Mick O’Brien) is a bad guy, but it is that (Megan)
just like me in my marriage didn’t know how to handle it. She didn’t
know who she was and she got married so young. You have to take a time
out and you have to start over, but you don’t want to drag five kids
with you to an unknown if you have no way to make a living. You are
going to move to New York and it is expensive there, so all of these
questions and the decisions that you make, you can’t just do it for your
own selfish reasons. You have to do it by taking the kids’ best
interests into account as well.
Imagine Megan in that family, you see the house that they live in, that
is where she lived too. You see the school and you see all of the
economic gifts that they had. Plus they had Nell (played
by Diane Ladd) who came to live with them, as soon as Megan took a
time out to go and put her life together. (Megan) fully thought she was
going to take the kids with her and fully thought that it was going to
work out, because you can’t be separated from your kids for that long.
When Nell gets there the kids are doing well in school and then how do
you interrupt them away from all of that and say now it is time for you
to come and live with me in New York? There is no black and white in
that and it is a gray area. She obviously kept in touch with her older
kids, but the young ones she really never knew.
As we get older and now I am a grandmother too, all of those reasons, I
wish I would have or I could have or all of the blame game on yourself
and whoever else you blamed for whatever happened in your whole life,
you get to a point when you say now I can’t live with that anymore. I
now know what is important no matter what.
I am going to go make it right and I am going to heal this
family. You see what is happening to the kids, because of mistakes that
you made and that your ex made. They are all living in this thing and
until you can heal yourself and help them heal nobody can move forward.
That is the chapter they are in now. Megan is back, because she wants to
heal them and to create brand new relationships going forward, because
family is the most important thing after all,” says Niven.
Chesapeake Shores
is filmed on Vancouver Island, in British Columbia Canada and more
specifically it is filmed at Qualicum Beach and Parksville one of
Canada’s most beautiful locations and Cedar Cove in which Barbara Niven
portrayed the character Peggy Beldon was filmed in North Vancouver,
British Columbia. While Toronto, Canada’s largest city is often depicted
as the center of the Canadian entertainment industry that is in fact a
misnomer, because in recent decades British Columbia has become the hub
for the arts in Canada (these
comments are purely the editorial comments of this writer, who has lived
in both Vancouver and Toronto and is in no way meant to reflect Ms.
Niven’s personal opinions).
Barbara Niven says, “So much of the film industry is up in Canada now
and I am really fortunate, because my father was born in Burnaby,
British Columbia, so I was able to get my dual citizenship. I am a full
dual citizen of Canada (and the United States), which makes it desirable
to hire me as an actress, because they get a tax credit up (in Canada).
It was perfect timing and before my father passed he made sure that we
went to an immigration attorney and that I was able to get this.
It is like coming home. I see dad around sending me little messages and
I know that he has orchestrated the whole thing from heaven. After I got
my citizenship I brought my dad up. He was in his eighties and he took
me to the area where he grew up. He told me stories about how poor they
were, but how much love they had in their family. It is always a
treasure to go back up there.”
What is it about the marriage between the Hallmark Channel and Barbara
Niven that just seems to work so well for each of them? Rather than
speculate we asked Barbara Niven that very question and this is what she
had to say.
“It is (a good
marriage) and corny as it sounds I am trying to make a difference in
this world and by putting out positive energy in so many ways. I try to
support causes that can make a difference and the people at Hallmark and
Hallmark Movies and Mysteries from the top down feel the same way. They
fight so hard to make a difference for animals, for people, for veterans
and they are just the kind of people that I like hanging out with. I
find that the fans of the Hallmark Network, almost to a person are the
same way. You can call us corny, but darn it those are the good family
values that I grew up with. That’s what I want my kid and my
grandchildren to live their lives by too. There is so much negativity
now and I honestly feel that part of that is because of haters and
revolutionaries and terrorists around the world are a lot louder with
their hate than we peaceful people are. That’s just how it is. Peace and
love are quieter, but they are also more powerful. The more that we can
each step up and hold hands around the world and not just here we can
make our voices, our love and our positive actions louder than hate and
stronger than hate. That’s what I think it is going to take.
Hallmark is a way to do that. Even at Christmas I have the Hallmark
channel with all of the Christmas movies on in the background and it
changes my attitude. That’s how I mark my Christmas and to have the
Christmas spirit. It has just saved me so much, because I get
overwhelmed and I think a lot of people do with what is going on in the
world. I need to in my heart and in my home
and in my family to remember that family is important and that
love is important and that heart to heart connections are important. I
don’t want to bring in and magnify the other stressors anymore. I know
that what we think and what we say, we can create. I just urge people to
concentrate on the positive and to start outcreating whatever is
negative, in your home, in your life or in this world. I know we can do
this together (you can hear the
passion in her voice) I know that sounds corny.
What is happening to our children who are watching the violence?
We allow our kids and ourselves to get used to seeing this kind
of violence and even the kind of violence in video games where people
are being obliterated and where kids can shoot each other etc. and we
are not outraged at the real thing anymore. We become numbed to it,” she
says.
Hallmark’s Murder, She Baked
mystery movies find that perfect balance of being a murder mystery
without the blood, gore and gratuitous violence. With film titles such
as Murder, She Baked: Just
Desserts, Murder, She Baked:
A Plum Pudding, Murder, She
Baked: A Peach Cobbler Mystery,
Murder, She Baked: A Chocolate
Chip Cookie Mystery as well as others, it is
far more likely that you will
become very hungry rather than horrified about what you see unfolding on
your television screens.
“Hallmark now has a sister network that is going off the charts with
growth too and it is called Hallmark Movies and Mysteries. It is for the
sleuth that is in all of us. If you liked Murder She Wrote and some of
those other kinds of mysteries, but you don’t want to see a lot of blood
and gore then Hallmark Murders and Mysteries is your channel. I have
been doing a series of them with Alison Sweeney (as Hannah Swensen)
where I play her mom. Alison is a baker in a small town and she just
keeps stumbling onto dead bodies. As
her mother Delores and as you know anybody named Delores has a big
personality, Delores is a big force of nature and she is just aghast
that this keeps happening to her daughter, because most of all it will
hurt her (Hannah’s) marital chances. Who is going to go out with
somebody who keeps finding dead bodies? Delores is a blast to play.
There is a lot of comedy and again it is on Hallmark. I would just be
happy to spend the rest of my life on Hallmark, the rest of my career. I
am just really proud to be a part of it,” says Barbara Niven and again
that passion has returned to her voice.
To understand how and why Barbara Niven first became an actor we need to
travel back in time to her childhood and she acts as our tour guide,
“Here is a little bit of my story. One of my first memories as a little
girl was in kindergarten and standing up in front of the audience at a
Christmas program. I still remember what I was wearing, the music that I
was singing called “Me and My Teddy Bear,” and I remember the goosebumps
that I got in front of the audience.
I still get the same
goosebumps from performing.
I grew up as a ham
and every time that there was a camera out I would be in the front of it
trying to do something. My parents used to laugh when I was a little kid
if they would lose me at the beach or at a family outing that they would
find me in the front of some family’s home movie, just waving and trying
to get attention. It is
embarrassing, but it just shows that I have always had it.
I ended up buying into what most people do, which is, that’s just a
dream. That will never happen. Get real with your life. After high
school I got married and I had a baby and I lived for ten years doing
what everybody else’s dream of me was even though inside I kept
thinking, well someday I’m going to do it.
One day I walked out to my mailbox and I pulled out a flyer for my ten
year high school reunion that was coming up. On that flyer that
everybody gets you have to write who did you marry? How many kids did
you have? Where did you live? At the bottom of mine was the (question)
have you achieved everything in your life that you thought you would by
now? That one sentence changed my life and it hit me like a ton of
bricks, because I hadn’t really started yet. That was the day that I
took stock and I decided if I don’t do it now I never will. I declared I
am going to be an actor and I am going to be in show business somehow.
I took stock of what I thought my talents were, because I had (been) to
college. I had gotten my real estate license, sold commercial real
estate, got married and then had a baby. That was it. I took stock and I
realized that I loved to write. I have always written and I love a
camera, so news reporting! Without any experience I knocked on the news
director’s door at the NBC affiliate in Portland, Oregon, called KGW and
I said will you mentor me if I bring you stories? Will you tell me, not
what’s good, but what is bad, so I can make it better, because I am
going to work for you? He liked my moxy. This was the caveat I said if
you mentor me I will pay it forward someday when I reach my own success.
That was the hook that made him say yes.
He gave me a sample script, so I would know what format to write it in
and then I just started acting as if I already was. I would call people
that I thought would want a TV interview, because who wouldn’t want that
in those days? I would say hello, my name is Barbie I am an associate
producer with KGW and we may do an interview with you on TV, but I need
to pre-produce you first, so can I interview you? Everybody said yes, so
I would take my tape recorder and I would tape the interview. Then I
would go back and write up the script. The next day I would show up in
the news director’s office again and I would say here it is. What do you
think? He ended up liking my moxy and I really could write, so he hired
me as an intern without college, which was the first time they made that
exception. I continued to do stories. As an intern, because I was not
union, I could appear one time on air as a reporter in my own story.
I announced that I am going to sell my story to network (even
today you can still hear the determination in her voice). I’m going
to do it guys! Everybody said sure, right, but I found a national hook
and I did it. It aired on NBC nationwide. I got put on there, but right
afterwards I discovered acting and that has been my passion ever since.
Even though I still do hosting, writing and I do commercials and all of
that, acting is what I love the most.”
The hour in which we spent talking to Barbara Niven flew by and we
wanted to make sure that we left time to chat about some other things
that are really important to her. One of those being a project that she
was involved with that was directed by Nicole Conn, a combination music
video and public service announcement in 2014 that advocated marriage
equality for members of the LGBT community. The video was titled
SHE4ME and is in this
writer’s opinion it makes one of the most beautiful statements about why
this is such an important issue.
“It is so beautiful and it helped promote marriage equality. We were
sponsored by Marriage Equality USA. I hope that it helped people to
understand that love is love is love. Why do we label it? We need to
celebrate it in whatever form.
When we did the
SHE4ME
video we wanted to do it in such a way that anybody
watching would see themselves in one of the characters. You can see
yourself as one of the people in the wedding, you can see yourself as
one of the people in the audience and I play the marriage officiator. It
is just taking away the scary face that some people think what being gay
is or being any part of the LGBT culture, trans or (she
changes direction slightly)…just getting back to no judgement and
love is love. Wherever we find that nowadays, we need to bless that and
to let it grow. We need to show our kids that we are not to judge, by
color, race, gender, faith, economics or any of all of that. It is just
about helping each other raise each other up. Hate is not something that
we are born with, hate is learned. Children see everything. We are their
role models. With our silence that makes us complicit in the crime, I
think.
Bullying is something else that I am passionate about, stopping bullying
of any kind and that means domestic terrorism. That means what we all
witnessed in Charlottesville (Virginia, August 2017) recently and that
means watching people chant horrific slogans and terrorize people again.
We thought that we had snuffed that out. I know I put myself on the
chopping block a lot, because I cannot sit back and just be silent about
that. We need to each standup and to be the change that we need to see
in the world as Mahatma Gandhi said.
If we are silent that is when evil grows. When good people are silent
that is when bad things happen. History has shown that over and over and
over again. I also condemn violence of any kind and I think that we can
snuff it out by kindness and paying kindness forward. There have been so
many misunderstandings since this whole political election happened (you
can hear the passion in her voice). Even in my own family we are torn
apart, because of political beliefs and people are saying, in the name
of God and all of this. All religions are based in love. That is how
every religion around us was started. Man came in and created the rules
and turned what was beautiful and what was at the core of all faiths and
turned it into something that we can’t recognize. At the base of it each
one of us needs to recognize that is what it is all about. It is all
love, no matter what you call it or what you label it with.
I hope that what I have with my fan base and however else that I am
blessed to be an influencer, I hope that is the one thing that people
take away from me. It is not about judgment. I don’t care who anybody
voted for, but we have to stop the judgment and we have to stop the
violence. We have to stop the
arguing at the moment that somebody says something that they disagree
with you (the passion returns to her voice). Everybody is just ready to
raise their voices and to fight about it. Just calm down and take it one
person and one family at a time and listen more than what you talk. Try
to come to an understanding, because at the heart of everything we need
to come together. Every parent wants the best for their children. We all
bleed the same color and we all have hopes and dreams and if we don’t
support each other….(her voice trails off, as she looks for the right
words). The thought that we don’t support each other is just
overwhelming,” she says.
Barbara Niven created an enterprise called Unleash Your Star Power and
she trains people in the use of media.
As she says, “It’s more than just media. It’s about being able to get
your message out in a succinct way, so the world can hear what you are
about and what your purpose is. I teach people about doing public
speaking or doing an interview or doing a video, but most of all I teach
people and I pass on what I’ve learned as an actress about handling
nerves or getting your message clear or talking to an audience. There
are so many things about that, about image and self-image. My real
purpose here I think is to help other people to get their message out. I
just want to give people courage to standup and to say their truth and
do it with love and kindness. You have to know how to say it.
I want to say that no matter what job you are in or no matter what you
are doing in life you have to follow your goosebumps. People always ask
me, how do you follow your dream? How do you get started and I just say
you gotta’ follow your goosebumps and if you are not getting goosebumps
you are settling. You are playing it too safe. Dust off those goosebumps
again and see what happens.”
You have no doubt heard other people over the years make similar types
of promises, some sincere, some much less so, but what gives Barbara
Niven so much credibility is first of all she has actually accomplished
everything that she is teaching you and as you have already heard, she
started from a very humble beginning. Secondly, you need to understand
that the confident cheerleader for humanity and accomplished actor that
Barbara Niven is today, well it has been as she says a journey to get to
this place in life.
She says, “We all struggle with self-esteem, but we all try to hide it
and think that it is only us. We all have something. I had an eating
disorder. We all have secrets and our secrets keep us sick. Maybe
somebody is struggling with alcoholism or credit card abuse or maybe
porn or whatever it is, we all have something. Until we can speak up and
give up the secret and punch that secret so that it lets all of the
pressure off it is going to keep us sick.
Now in my life I try to be out with the things that I struggle with or
have dealt with, especially in my career. The camera always adds ten
pounds, so I am always trying to be on a diet. I never feel that I am as
thin as I should be. You know what, that’s life. The other one that I am
out with is ageism in Hollywood. I’m 64 this year and it is not supposed
to happen that I should be working on stuff still at this age, but if I
bought into that, you are over 40, you can’t act anymore or give it up,
and that’s how my life would have been.
Whatever is bothering us we have to standup for each other and say this
is me and that’s you and let’s just get over ourselves and start
building each other up again. Part of that is I don’t want my daughter
to have to worry about getting older or to have her daughter struggle
with an eating disorder. My mom had it, I had it and my daughter did
have it. That is because we all didn’t talk about it, we kept it a
secret.
Once I got a phone call from my daughter’s school saying that she had
fainted at cheerleading practice. Why did I not see the red flags? It
turns out they had all been doing bulimia and anorexia together to fit
into their cheerleading uniforms when they were in high school. That is
when it hit me and I said enough is enough. I am never going to be
silenced again. I am never going to let my secrets keep me sick again. I
now speak on eating disorders. It is not just about eating disorders it
is about whatever is keeping us sick, because we just need to be over
ourselves and to be out with it.
We put so much energy into those things. I can’t tell you how much
energy that I had in hiding the whole food issue for thirty years. Other
people with alcohol or drugs or whatever would put so much energy into
that. What could we accomplish if we just said I’m not doing that
anymore? What could we
accomplish in our life and our own personal dreams if we put that energy
elsewhere?
We can’t settle in our lives for just okay. In our countries and in our
nations I think we are all having wakeup calls now that we have to do
something to make a difference. I urge people today to do something for
yourself, for your family, for your nation, your world and your planet.
Let’s not give up five minutes before the miracle, because we can do
this. I have just learned in my life to expect miracles, because our
thoughts become things.
You learn when you are an actress that art imitates life or is it life
imitating art? All we have as an actor or any kind of an artist, a
painter, a writer or a musician or anybody who is creative at all, all
that we have to use as tools to feel that creativity are ourselves. The
older one gets the more beautiful tools and instruments you have to add
to your orchestra and your palette.
I just feel so blessed to be able to make a living doing what I love and
I am passionate now about helping other people to live their dreams
too.” We have just barely scratched the surface of who this beautiful, gifted actor and woman is and now we want to know Barbara, when are you going to start writing your autobiography, because you should. Please visit the
website for Barabara Niven.
|
Chesapeake
Shores
