Interview (Part 1): Karin delaPeña Collison

My interview with the 2021 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner.

Karin delaPeña Collison wrote the original screenplay “Coming of Age” which won a 2021 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Karin about her creative background, her award-winning script, the craft of screenwriting, and what winning the Nicholl Award has meant to her.

Today in Part 1 of a 6 part series to run each day through Saturday, Karin talks about her background as a child actor.

Scott Myers: Great to have you here, Karin. Let’s begin with your professional background. Your bio offers quite a resume. For starters, “Professional child performer in all media in the UK, US, and Asia.” How did you get such a young start?

Karin Collison: We needed money, and I showed a facility at a very early age for performing. Actually, the first role I ever performed was Jesus. I was at a convent school. I was all of six, I think. This is a vivid memory. They were auditioning girls at this convent in the countryside of England to play Jesus in their annual play.

I’ve forgotten many of my Bible stories, but this scene was where Jesus goes to the temple and tells off the money lenders in the temple.

Scott: Tax collectors.

Karin: Tax collectors? OK. I remember auditioning against a little blonde girl. Her name was Jill. It’s one of those weird things that sticks in your brain. They gave the part to me, and I definitely caught the performing bug.

Scott: When you say your family needed money, what was this? Your mom, your dad?

Karin: My father was not dissimilar to the character of Micky [in her Nicholl screenplay]. The character Micky is not a deadbeat dad. But my actual father would definitely qualify, I’m afraid to say. He just bailed on us. We needed money to survive — pay the rent and so on. When I was about eight my mother was working for an agent in London. Actually, Michael Caine’s original agent. I remember his name was Bill. He took one look at my brother and me — my brother was younger than me but just as tall and we looked like twins. The agent said, “Well, these two could do commercials. It would bring in extra money..”

[laughs]

My brother had no interest at all. But I was totally on board. We did one commercial together. It was for a drink in England, which still exists, called Lucozade. It’s this glucose drink that’s supposedly good to give to ill kids. I hated it, but my mother had coached me to lie if I was auditioning for a product I didn’t actually like. I remember they left my brother and me alone on the set while they set up the cameras. It was a set depicting a child’s bedroom with two beds. There was a toy cupboard between the beds. In it, there was a water pistol. I was fascinated by all that was going on around me, but my brother was so bored that he filled the water pistol with Lucozade, and proceeded to squirt it around; it got on a camera lens. He was not popular and was not invited back. I was invited back several times. I did a series of those commercials.

My mother enrolled me in a stage school. I think I was nine when I started going there. And from then on, I was working.

Scott: Working as an actor?

Karin: Yes. Mostly in film and TV, initially.

Scott: Not on stage.

Karin: At that age, just film and TV. I did loads of theater after that.

Scott: Then in your early 20s, you went into journalism.

Karin: Even though by that time, I’d moved to the US, and taken my independence into my own hands, the engine behind me was still my mother. She died shortly after I moved to LA. That just took the wind out from under me.

Also, I always had a good brain. You know what it’s like being an actor. You’re rarely offered anything that really gives you anything to chew on, intellectually. Especially out here in Los Angeles.

I went for a long visit to my brother and sister‑in‑law, who lived in Paris. Although I ended up doing a play when I was staying with them, I took a break from the film business. And that gave me the chance to notice that all my brother’s friends with “normal” jobs had these wonderful lives. They did things like taking skiing holidays. Things that I had never done because I was always reluctant to lose the chance of getting an acting job.

So when I returned to the US, I quit acting. Ironically, I quit right when I had just started getting guest star TV roles. And lovely little cameo roles in movies. But I was quite simply done. I’d had enough. I thought I was out of it forever.

After that, I had a bunch of different administrative jobs here and there while I tried to figure out what I wanted to do. And then I fell into this journalism job.

Scott: Was that the first time you did something officially as a writer?

Karin: Yes. It was the complicity of circumstances. I was working at Dun & Bradstreet as a secretary in the marketing department. My boss was in a power struggle with her boss. She agreed to be shipped off to another site on the condition that he didn’t fire me.

He agreed, but he didn’t want me hanging out in the marketing department so he sent me over to editorial. He had no idea if I could put one word in front of another. I didn’t know that, either. But I could. And I enjoyed it. And I used their educational benefits to take a couple of writing courses at Columbia.

After I’d left Dunn and Bradstreet, I tried to stick around in journalism. But I was, once again, in a career where the supply was much greater than the demand. I just thought, “If I’m going to fight my corner, I’ll fight it as an actress. I just wasn’t that attached to being a writer.”

Tomorrow in Part 2, Karin discusses how she found her way into screenwriting.

For my interviews with every Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting winner since 2012, go here.

For my interviews with Black List writers, go here.