People who remember Faith Ford as the ever-perky Corky on “Murphy Brown” are always surprised when they meet her. They’re expecting a real-life version of her fabricated character.
“I’m actually very shy. I’m not an extrovert, and I think acting is a way of putting it out there without actually being that way myself,” she says.
“I think I also observe and like people, so usually when I act, I’m kind of doing impressions of people, in a way. ”
Ford has co-starred with pal Kelly Ripa in “Hope & Faith,” and on “The Norm Show,” “Carpoolers,” “Murder She Wrote” and “thirtysomething.” On Dec. 27 she stars in “A Kiss at Midnight,” a telefilm on the Hallmark Channel.
Ford plays a professional matchmaker who hasn’t found her own true love.
“It’s a good message for young people, as well as older people: Don’t give up on love,” says Ford.
“You always see the woman divorced trying to make it again, or you see the woman in the middle of a marriage that’s trying to make it work. You don’t very often find a woman who’s 40 and hasn’t found her match. I like that.”
It took her two tries, but Ford has found Mr. Right in her writer-producer husband, Campion Murphy.
“I met him in Sedona (Ariz.),” she recalls. “A friend said I should go there when I was separated from my (first) husband, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. . . . At the time I wasn’t looking to meet a person, I was just looking to figure things out.
“I think one of the first things he said to me was, ‘I want to come and share life, adding to your life. And when I stop adding to your life I don’t want to be here anymore.’ That’s been his attitude, and it’s always been my attitude in my relationships — work or friendships or love or with my parents.”
Ford is a homebody at heart. She loves cooking, puttering. “I’m good at most things that have to do with the home, around the home, nesting,” she says.
She is also eager to be a mother. “When I was married before I was not interested in kids at that time. But when I married my husband now, I immediately wanted to have children and didn’t realize that maybe I’d have problems. And I’ve had a lot of fertility issues, I’ve had a couple of surrogates. Who knows, I might adopt or whatever. I’m a mothering-type person. It’s not a matter of if it’s going to be, but when. How, I don’t know but it’s going to be.”
Ford began as a model. “Looking back I can’t believe I came to New York from Pineville, La., at 17.
“I knew no one. I wasn’t afraid. It’s only 4 miles wide. It’s just a lot of people crammed into a small space. It was part of what I needed to do.
“I was really comfortable being at home cooking with my mother. My ideal was to have my kids and live down the street from her and she’d babysit.”
But Ford wangled her first acting part on the soap “One Life to Live,” cut a Diet Pepsi commercial and was on her way.
“I was kind of cute, kind of ‘Southern’ when I moved to New York and didn’t really know enough to know I shouldn’t be doing it.”
