ARTICLE WRITTEN BY JASON BONDEROFF

Child stars are supposed to be maladjusted and unhappy. So what's a sweet, unaffected kid like Kathy Kamhi doing in show business? Breaking the mold, that's what! She wasn't pushed into the limelight by an overambitious stagemother and-unlike Jodie Foster, Kristy McNichol or Brooke Shields-she doesn't even come from a broken home. What a bummer!
  "I think I'm the only kid in New York whose parents are still happily married", laughs 17-year-old Kathy, who plays Pam Kingsley on All My Children. When Kathy attended New York's Performing Arts High School, her happy home life nearly made her an outcast. How'd she survive? "I used to lie and say my parents were divorced just so I could be in," she reveals. "Isn't that incredible? When teachers would ask 'How many of you have divorced parents?' nearly every hand in class would go up. I'd be embarrassed not to raise mine, too"
  Kathy's now a senior at Professional Children's School (where she can skip classes and do make up work while performing on All My Children)-and she's finally accepted the fact that there just aren't any painful skeleton's in the family closet. In fact, she's downright proud of the whole group. Her dad, Maurice, is an actor and director; her mom Barbara-a former concert pianist-now works as an accompanist at the ballet school run by Richard Thomas' dad; and her brother Jay, 20, is studying theater directing at N.Y.U.
  Kathy herself started out as a dancer. At the age of 11, she appeared with the Bolshoi Ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House; then came bit roles in major movies, like Audrey Rose and Fame. Recently, Kathy was reunited with two of the Fame girls, Maureen Teefy and Laura Deane, in an afternoon special, Diary of a Teenage Shoplifter. "We played best friends," Kathy says. "I was the girl trying to talk them out of shoplifting."
  Admittedly, she's "a very picky dater," and tends to choose boyfriends who share her interests in show business. Coming from such a talented family, it's not surprising. Ironically, the only member of the Kamhi clan who's not into reading Variety every day is her 18-year-old brother Adam. He's an auxiliary cop on the New York police force. "The rest of us think he's the one with a really strange profession." Kathy laughs.

mouse over KATHERINE KAMHI circa 2003