Celebrity crush: Poppy Montgomery

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-at- gmail -dot- com to give me credit information on photos here.

Today's actress is an Australian native who will return to American TV this fall playing a cop with a perfect memory. (Don't piss her off.)

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As a redhead for her new police
drama, CBS's Unforgettable.

Name: Poppy Montgomery (images -- some NSFW | Web site | Twitter)
Hometown: Born and raised in Sydney, Australia, and its suburbs, according to her Wikipedia profile. She and her sisters were named for flowers, their brother after Jethro Tull, which suggests their parents just MIGHT have had hippie tendencies. (Not that there's anything wrong with that!)
Best Known For: Poppy's best known to American TV audiences for her co-starring role on the FBI drama Without a Trace, which ran for season seasons (2002-2009) on the CBS network. She'll return to CBS (home of the crime procedural) this fall on Unforgettable, based on J. Robert Lennon's short story "The Rememberer" (also the show's original, hard-to-pronounce working title).

As Marilyn Monroe in Blonde.

Other highlights of her career so far include the 2001 American TV mini-series Blonde, based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name about Marilyn Monroe; that was really her breakthrough role, leading to the later dramatic TV work. She also co-starred in Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana's blink-and-you-missed it cop drama The Beat on the UPN network and in the mid-'90s romantic ensemble drama Relativity from the creators of 1980s romantic ensemble drama Thirtysomething.

If you're beautiful enough to play
Marilyn Monroe -- and she is --
this sort of photo probably happens
more often than to other people.

Feature film roles have not been very numerous due to her TV schedule and motherhood. But she appeared in the comedy Dead Man on Campus (which co-starred fellow crush Alyson Hannigan), the Denzel Washington retro detective drama Devil in a Blue Dress, and the sisterhood tear-jerker The Other Sister (all probably small roles). She's done a lot of TV movies, though, and recently played an obscure English author named Rowling who wrote a book about some shaggy-haired kid with a magic wand and a pet bird. Guess it pays the bills...
Humble Beginnings: Poppy did guest roles on Silk Stalkings (a two-parter), NYPD Blue, and Party of Five before landing her Without a Trace regular role. She was also a regular on a short-lived Kevin Williamson series called Glory Days that I'd completely forgotten ever happened. (That co-starred fellow celebrity crush Emily VanCamp -- who resembles some of Montgomery's earlier photos.) And she played Party Girl #1 in something called Tammy and the T-Rex. (Again, if it pays the bills...)

Why Ye Olde Podcaster Likes Her: Though she's only 5'5" according to IMDB, Poppy has a presence that makes her seem to loom larger on the screen. I'm obviously most familiar with her work on Without a Trace -- 160 episodes, most of which I saw at least once -- and know she can play a steely-nerved FBI agent well. But she also brought out agent Samantha Spade's maternal side near the end, after actress and character both became mothers.

She's great with a wisecrack, and commercials for Unforgettable make me wonder if there might not be a bit more humor to that role than what she had to work with on Without a Trace. And like fellow Aussie crush Anna Torv of Fringe -- with whom there's a passing resemblance -- when Poppy Montgomery's characters DO smile, it's worth the wait.

Film and TV-movie credits: Magic Beyond Words: The J.K. Rowling Story (Amazon | iTunes) * Lying to Be Perfect (2010 TV-movie) (Amazon | iTunes) * Snow Wonder (2005 TV-movie) (Amazon | iTunes) * Murder in the Hamptons (2005 TV-movie) (Amazon | iTunes) * Between (2005) (Amazon | iTunes) * How to Lose Your Lover (Amazon | iTunes) * Raising Waylon (2004 TV-movie) (Amazon | iTunes) * Men Named Milo, Women Named Greta (2000 short) (Amazon | iTunes) * This Space Between Us (Amazon | iTunes) * Life (1999) (Amazon | iTunes) * The Other Sister (Amazon | iTunes) * The Wonder Cabinet (1999 TV-movie) (Amazon | iTunes) * Dead Man on Campus (Amazon | iTunes) * Desert's Edge (1997 short) (Amazon | iTunes) * The Cold Equations (1996 TV-movie) (Amazon | iTunes) * Peacock Blues (1996 short) (Amazon | iTunes) * Devil in a Blue Dress (Amazon | iTunes) * Jake Lassiter: Justice on the Bayou (1995 TV-movie) (Amazon | iTunes) * Tammy and the T-Rex (Amazon | iTunes)

(Click to enlarge and read text.) I'm
going to guess this refers to How
to Lose Your Lover, which also had
Tori Spelling in its ensemble.

TV and Web series credits: Unforgettable, season 1 (Amazon | iTunes) * Without a Trace, season 7 (Amazon | iTunes) * Without a Trace, season 6 (Amazon | iTunes) * Without a Trace, season 5 (Amazon | iTunes) * Without a Trace, season 4 (Amazon | iTunes) * Without a Trace, season 3 (Amazon | iTunes) * Without a Trace, season 2 (Amazon | iTunes) * Without a Trace, season 1 (Amazon | iTunes) * Glory Days (2002) (Amazon | iTunes) * Going to California (2001): "Hurricane Al: A Tale of Key Largo" (Amazon | iTunes) * Blonde (2001 TV miniseries) (Amazon | iTunes) * The Beat (2000) (Amazon | iTunes) * Relativity (1996) (Amazon | iTunes) * NYPD Blue, season 3: "Burnin' Love" (Amazon | iTunes) * Party of Five, season 2: "Poor Substitutes" (Amazon | iTunes) * Silk Stalkings, season 4 (Amazon | iTunes)