Interview with Actress and Singer Bettina Devin

Bettina Devin is a television actress, a film actress and a stage actress who also sings, is a vocal coach and an acting coach and has recently acted as a casting director for a couple of film projects. She drew rave reviews from her role in Rent, was hilarious in an episode of The New Love American Style, guest starred on Who’s The Boss, Brand New Life and Alice and was featured in the made for television movie Raid On Entebbe. She has a principal role in the spine tingling and eerie James Cotton film The Confessional and she starred in Mark Sobel’s independent film Little Secrets.

Bettina Devin would also like you to know, “I like talking about social media, because it has very much contributed to Bettina Devin’s success.  A lot of women my age are not into this stuff. A lot of my friends will say, I don’t want to do it and I will say you are missing the boat. It has helped my business so much. I don’t go on there and look and see who had a corned beef sandwich, because I don’t care and I certainly do not have time to post that stuff. It has helped me to regain my connections with some of my older students. When I say older, I mean from nine years ago. I no longer had valid email addresses for them and I found them on Facebook. Some of them have come back and studied with me. (I use social media) for the promotion of whatever films that I am involved in and it has really changed my career and my business as a coach.”

Ms. Devin says that in her teaching she not only prepares her students in the skills of acting and singing, but she tries to also prepare them mentally for the business side of the arts. As she says, “It’s the business and navigating it.”

Bettina Devin also notes, “Social media helps me to get more specific about targeting those that I want to see, whether it is about me, my students, my business, a movie or whatever. Most recently whatever has turned into being a casting director.

“I am casting this feature (film) and it is called Finding Cool. Now when I am the one on the other end and I see people who are submitting (for auditions), they don’t know how to do it.

I am casting twenty-five roles. It is a lot and they aren’t typical roles. I am also an associate producer for the film and I asked the writer director to write me in a role, so he did. I have a small role. Finding Cool is really an exploration of what does cool mean? It is so funny.  What an education it is for any actor, to get into casting,” she says.

Bettina Devin now lives in San Francisco once again, the city where she grew up, the daughter of “Rhoda a frustrated singer. She was talented as a young girl and she was offered her own radio show in San Francisco. It was a Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm story, her father wouldn’t permit it. She didn’t feel that it was appropriate, so my mother really was frustrated. It came out through other things artistically. Everybody knew (Rhoda) and she ended up opening a store in the sixties. It was a style setter for a lot of people. My dad was a doctor. Both of my parents were incredibly supportive. I always knew when I was three that is what I wanted to do.”

This prompted a somewhat obvious question from your inquisitive journalist. How did you know that you wanted to be an actress when you were three years old? “I think that I just came out that way. I believe that people come out that way. It was really singing for me for the first part. I think that I was pretty naturally gifted at it, but I would cheat, because I would ask the piano player if they could play something for me, so I could hear how it went and then I didn’t really learn how to read music well enough, because my ear was so good that I would do what they did. I took Classical and then when I transferred from public school to private school and I was overloaded with homework, I pretty well gave up the piano. I just couldn’t do the practicing. My parents were very supportive with lessons and everything, but I never really took acting classes until college.

While attending a performing arts school in San Diego, following her stint at Boston University, Ms. Devin won a talent contest when she was twenty-one years old and the first prize for the winner was a three month gig at the Catamaran, a well-known Jazz club in the city.  The person who sponsored the talent contest was Toni Michetti who would become Ms. Devin’s manager.

“For that gig Toni got world class musicians for me. The bass player was Bob Magnusson who had just come off the road from two years with Sarah Vaughan.  Gene Hartwell who is still in San Diego is a magnificent pianist. I didn’t know, I was so spoiled and I thought all musicians were going to be like this. No (she laughs). It was quite a start for the club work,” she says.

Fast forward to the past decade and at times Bettina Devin’s career has appeared ready to soar and at other times it has seemed in peril, due to serious health issues. “I have been on the receiving end of a lot of crappy, physical karma and lots of serious health issues and they felled me, for usually two years at a time I was unable to do anything. I could barely move. One was a massive tumor in my back, which thank God was fine, but I had half of my back taken out. I had a knee replacement go wrong. It took two years out of my life. They said I would be back to work in six months. If you see me, you can’t believe it, because I look like little Miss Fit Person, but I am really spit and glue and then the voice thing, which really stopped me, mainly because of depression and you can imagine.”

The voice thing is spasmodic dysphonia, for which there is no known cure and it causes spasms to occur in the muscles of the larynx producing a tremor in the individual’s vocals. Prominent people who also have this condition are Robert Kennedy Jr., Scott Adams the creator of Dilbert and it is thought that Katharine Hepburn may also have had spasmodic dysphonia. For an actor or a singer such as Ms. Devin, this could have been lethal.

“The voice thing didn’t happen until after a run of movies (that she acted in), Full Picture, Village Barber Shop, And The Confessional.  I shot all of them in the summer of 2006. Prior to that Rent came out (2005). It was such a small role and they even wrote in a line for me. In 2006, Bettina Devin also appeared in a stage production based on the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. In the summer of 2006 I did those three films, that show and then I had the knee replacement and that was it for two years. I couldn’t do anything. I had a really, really bad time. I can now play very believably a junkie (she laughs) after that experience. I went through a horrific withdrawal from Fentanyl, which is a pain thing that is just two steps down from heroin. It was horrific.

As for her role in The Confessional, “It is very scary and it is very Hitchcock like. I remember when I read the script that James Cotton wrote and directed it was a page turner for me. I liked my role as the busybody and I remember my audition for James that day. I got lost going to his office in the East Bay and I was running late, which I hate to be. I was mad, because the directions weren’t helpful. I was all flustered and I thought this is perfect for the scene for which I was reading, because that is who she is supposed to be. She is late for the first meeting with the priest and she is the church busybody who runs everything. I thought use it Bettina, use it. That is all the stuff that I have learned in all my classes and that I still continue to teach. It is really Mesineresque, what is happening to you goes on through the lines. I nailed it, because I was really upset and flustered,” she laughs.

She has fond memories of her role in Rent “It was so cool to work with Chris Columbus. He’s such a lovely man and every single person on that set and particularly the actors who had worked with each other for years in the original production of Rent. Every single one of them is a class act. They didn’t have to be so courteous and welcoming to those of us who were whatever…I forget how many days that I worked on that, a week or four days, but they were so welcoming.

I will tell you what I liked about the role. What I learned from doing that role was so huge. You stay in your (character’s ) life, every single minute. You don’t know when the camera is on you. I am in a scene where there are a gazillion people at the wedding reception and it was huge, lots of extras and you don’t  know when the camera is on you. Be in your (character’s) life every minute. It paid off for me. I thought that I had been cut out of the film, because when I went to the IMDB listing before the movie came out, I wasn’t on there. I thought Oh My God, I am on the cutting room floor. (I thought) it was such a small role they cut me. When the screening was happening up at Lucas, at the ranch, of course I wanted to go and I braced myself for seeing the film and not being in it. I just thought oh well maybe I got cut. I walked in and one of the gals walked up to me and threw her arms around me and she said you’re in our movie. I said, am I? She said yes and you are getting fabulous responses from the screenings all around the country. What I learned was, because I committed to being in my (character’s) life, every time that the camera was on me, it liked being with me, because there was something going on with my thinking. I didn’t have a lot to say. You saw the person thinking the whole time. I hope that Rent isn’t my claim to fame forever, but it is such a teaching opportunity for me with my students. You see a lot of me in those two scenes that I am in, because the camera liked what it saw. The camera was watching a person thinking. We like to watch actors think.”

She relished her role as the villainess in the film Doggie Boogie, which the international film distributor renamed and called it Doggie B, but in North America it will retain the original name.  “Everybody loves the villain and you get to be pretty and scary and you get all the laughs. Come on!”

She recalls the onset of spasmodic dysphonia, “I think this is the fifth year since it reared its ugly head. I was just getting over my knee replacement when my voice started getting weird. Any little thing or any ghost kinds of sounds that you get, when you are a singer and you start going Oh My God, am I losing my voice? My boyfriend is used to me being precious about my voice, but something was weird and I started having this tremor that I couldn’t control. It was in my speech and it kept going on and on. It just persisted and finally I said to my boyfriend, honey do you hear this? I went on the internet and I typed in my symptoms and bam! It came up. It took me months to get formally diagnosed. I really found out by writing Scott Adams who writes Dilbert. He is one of the more famous victims of it. He was so nice to email me back and we talked about a lot of the things that you can try to do. It was hard to get diagnosed at first, because the default diagnosis is acid reflux. I never really believed it and I also got checked out for Parkinson’s, because of the tremor. One of the key things for Parkinson’s is if you are bumping into things and falling and I was not doing that. Then I took treatments in San Francisco, which were injections of Botox in your vocal chords. I tried that two or three times and I just hated it.  It wasn’t painful, but I just hated it. It is really not a precise science. They really don’t know what they are doing and the guy that I went to is the king, really. If anybody knows it would be him. Four to six weeks after I got the injections, (she lowers her voice to a squeaky, whisper) this is as much sound as I could make. I couldn’t make any more sound than this. I was teaching and I was using a microphone in a small room to teach. Insurance wouldn’t cover it, despite the fact that my voice was my income. I just decided that I would rather have the tremor (she lowers her voice again) I don’t want to sound like Minnie Mouse on her deathbed. (This writer laughs and then apologizes and she says) “It is funny. You have to laugh. The reason they give you Botox for SD is because the tremor stops. Once my voice sounded normal, it only lasted for about three weeks and then I dealt with the tremor again. I just thought screw this. I’m sorry, I’m going to make a career of doing (she changes her voice to imitate) Kate Hepburn rather than (she changes her voice again) Minnie Mouse.”

“My character in Doggie Boogie has a lot of Kate Hepburn in her, so I got to use my SD,” she says.

When asked if she got to play opposite a Spencer Tracy type of person she lowers her voice, and deeply coos, “Unfortunately no (she bursts out laughing). He’s a young good looking guy, so that’s okay. He plays my nemesis.”

Don’t think a little thing like a knee replacement or having an unpredictable voice will stop this sixty-something actress, “When I teach singing, I can’t demonstrate like I did. I cannot use my head voice, because it engages the tremor big time. It has made me a better teacher. I have had to find better ways to explain things and the other thing is when my students say ‘I can’t do this, I go really. You can’t do this? How come I, who am truly handicapped and they all know that, because I tell them, if I can do this, you can do it. It has really helped me to become a better teacher.”

It is somehow fitting that this writer had an opportunity to sit down and chat with Bettina Devin on the advent of the Olympic Games held in London. Some athletes are sprinters who mesmerize us as the sprint to the finish line, others wow us with their strength, but when one thinks of Bettina Devin, she is more like the triathletes “who gut it out,” and inspire us, because of their determination and at the end of the day whether they win the gold medal or not they are all winners, because they just accomplished what few of us can do. We need more people like Bettina Devin in this world who can inspire that young child, teenager or adult, both challenging them and encouraging them. Heroes are not always the ones that you read about in the press, sometimes they are people like Bettina Devin.

Please visit the Bettina Devin website.

Interviewed by Joe Montague

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