Once an Angel, you’re an Angel for life.  Not that being thought of first and foremost as a former Charlie’s Angel is a bad thing.

“Oh, I love it,” Jaclyn Smith says.  “’Charlie’s Angels’ is a part of my life.  But a lot of people are like, ‘Oh, we can’t bring it up.’  I don’t know why people assume that, but they do.”

Smith, now starring in the Hallmark Channel Original Mother’s Day movie “Ordinary Miracles,” was the only cast member to appear in every episode during the show’s five-year run.  When people greet her, some even address her as Kelly, the name of her character, one of the three beautiful women P.I.s working for a boss they had never seen.  Many critics dismissed the show as a sexist male fantasy, but viewers loved it.

“It was really the first show of its kind,” Smith says.  “Most shows up to that point – action shows and detective shows – almost all had men as the leads.  And here, all of a sudden, three girls came along.  That’s feminist, not sexist.  In that respect, in our own small way, maybe we helped open the door a little bit for women.”

The show certainly opened doors for Smith.  Since “Charlie’s Angels” wrapped, she starred in more than 30 TV movies and miniseries, started a family and became a heavy hitter in the clothing industry.  Amazingly, she deftly manages to keep all three balls –  commitments to careers, marriage and motherhood – in the air.

In her Hallmark Channel movie, Smith plays a tough and unyielding judge who, despite weathering a number of personal crises, welcomes a troubled teen into her home.  The ensuing relationship heals both of them.  It’s the kind of movie Smith believes we need more of.

“We need more positive messages,” she says.  “I’ve seen what people are watching and I’m not too pleased with a lot of it.  Our children are getting desensitized.  I want something positive for a change instead of a front-page murder or a disease-of-the-week.  Let’s have more things that are uplifting, with a message and a moral.”

Smith’s second career, overseeing virtually every aspect of Kmart’s Jaclyn Smith line of clothing and accessories, has thrived since 1985; more recently, she entered the home furnishings arena, as well.  The mother of two grown children, she has been married to Brad Allen, a Chicago heart surgeon, since 1997.

Smith, who survived a breast cancer scare in 2002, is the first to admit it’s a sweet life she never anticipated as a girl growing up in Houston, Texas.  “I went to New York to study with the New York School of Ballet,” she recalls.  “I thought I would be a dancer, but other things happened.  Before too long, I was put under an option contract at Paramount and the acting sort of happened.”
Yet it’s not through her career that Smith defines herself.  Name some of the movies she has done through the years and she’s hard-pressed to remember when they were made.  “The only dates I remember, my son was born in 1982 and my daughter was born in 1985,” she says.  “Other than that, numbers go out of my head.  It’s like from their births on, that’s when my life really began.”

- HALLMARK CHANNEL -