Fifteen-year-old Melissa George was the one to beat at the 1992 junior world roller-skating championships in her native Australia, having finished second the previous year. Then, the day before the finals, "I slipped and cracked my tailbone," says George. Loaded up on painkillers, she "fell on every jump" and finished 23rd. "I got up and left and everyone was crying."
Nowadays the resilient George, 25, is kicking derriere on ABC's Thieves as cat burglar John Stamos's karate-savvy partner. Watching George's tough-gal act "is such a funny thing," says husband Claudio Dabed, 36, a Chilean furniture exporter. "In real life she's so soft, she's like a cotton ball." Maybe, but the actress (who also appears briefly in the film Mulholland Drive) holds her own on a set. Stamos relishes their verbal byplay. "It's like music, like jamming with someone you just jibe with," he says. .
Born in Perth, one of four children of Pamela, 47, a nurse, and Glenn, 50, a construction worker, George quit skating—and high school—at 16 to play a runaway on an Australian soap. At 20 she came to the U.S. and got cast in a string of failed TV pilots before nabbing Thieves. Now she and Dabed share their L.A. condo three months a year with Martina, 6, his daughter from a previous relationship. George dotes on her. "I want a lot of kids," she says, "but I can't have a child in this job. When could I see the baby?"
Your Reaction
