New York-born actress Glynnis O'Connor was primed for acting right from the beginning. Her father is producer Daniel O'Connor and mother, Lenka Peterson, an actress who would later play minor roles in TV-movies with her. Brother Kevin J. O'Connor also has appeared successfully on film and TV. In her late teens she was featured on the daytime soap "As the World Turns" and soon after starred in her own short-lived prime time series "Sons and Daughters," a soapy drama about young love in the 1950s, co-starring Gary Frank from the TV series "Family." A graduate of the State University of New York, Glynnis had an immediate impact portraying sensitive, fretful young romantics and definitely hit her stride in her early adult career with the poignant film Jeremy (1973) with Robby Benson as two docile teens who fall in love in New York City. She reunited with Benson in the popular backwoods love story Ode to Billy Joe (1976), a take-off on the Bobbie Gentry 60s pop/folk hit which offered an interesting sexual hypothesis as to why the troubled title character "jumped off the Talahatchie Bridge," and in the excellent TV stage production of "Our Town" in which she played Emily Webb to Benson's George Gibbs. Along the way she further tugged at TV viewer's heartstrings in "Senior Year" (1974), "All Together Now" (1975) and "The Boy in the Plastic Bubble" (1976) starring up-and-coming John Travolta. She hooked up with Jan-Michael Vincent in another rural romance in the film Baby Blue Marine (1976) and movingly played ill-fated tennis champion Maureen Connolly in "Little Mo" (1978) on the small screen. With all this diversity displayed, Glynnis still lacked that certain spark that could take her into the front ranks. Her name and off-camera personality somehow never meshed with the movie-going public despite her continued excellence into the 80s with the Canadian film Melanie (1982), as an uneducated woman trying to regain custody of her son, and the intensely dramatic TV-movie "Why Me?" (1984) as an Air Force nurse forced to readjust into society after a shockingly disfiguring car accident. Following this Glynnis' career went into a rather swift decline, her billing falling further and further down the credits list. Despite this career setback, Glynnis has managed to persever, and can still be seen sporadically on both film and TV.
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