Her Parents Live In Kent, But Josie Isn't Girl Next Door

Josie Bissett photographs well, but not today, please.

The 22-year-old co-star of Fox's "Melrose Place" sniffles. She is getting over a cold. She's happy to do an interview. But no pictures, please. No makeup. Not today.

Even an under-the-weather, makeup-less Bissett has the kind of beauty that might be described as the "girl next door." Whereupon you realize you grew up in the wrong neighborhood.

Bissett's childhood home is in Kent, at the end of a cul-de-sac, in a remodeled 1919 white farmhouse. Her parents still live there.

Bissett came home for the holidays. She's counting the days until her husband, an actor with his own TV series, flies up from California to join the family. She sniffles occasionally as she talks about her role on "Melrose Place" (the show airs Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on KCPQ, Channel 13).

On the "Beverly Hills, 90210" spinoff, Bissett plays Jane, an aspiring designer married to Michael, a medical intern. He also manages the apartment complex called Melrose Place. The other young tenants are all unmarried. Extremely so.

While Jake and Billy and Alison and the others are va-va-va-vooming all over the place, Jane idles at home, waiting for her man to return from another 48-hour shift at the hospital.

"In a way, being married on the show kinda sucks," admits Bissett, wearing a black Fox varsity jacket and snuggling her legs under a blanket while reclining on her parents' leather sofa.

"Michael never wanted to make love, that was the story line for a couple episodes," Bissett said. "It was hard for me to relate to."

Shoppers in check-out lines everywhere got a hint of Bissett's real-life connubial bliss in a recent People magazine story. The lead photo featured hubby Rob Estes kissing Bissett's foot while the couple engaged in some bathtub gymnastics.

Estes stars as a detective in the mirror-steaming CBS late-night series "Silk Stalkings." He and Bissett met on a movie-of-the-week audition last year. He moved in to her West L.A. apartment two months after their first date. They married on May Day, two days before "Melrose Place" began filming.

One of their wedding pictures hangs in the Kent farmhouse, in a closet-sized room devoted to family memorabilia and photos. Most of them feature Bissett and her five siblings, two related by blood and three adopted.

There's a black-and-white publicity photo from 1990, when Bissett was a semi-regular on "The Hogan Family" TV series.

A videotape box for the teen romance movie "Book of Love."

An unauthorized "Melrose Place" book.

A class photo from sixth or seventh grade, when Bissett's hair was curly and her last name was Heutmaker.

It would be several years before she would change it to her mother's maiden name, because her father's family name was too hard for agents to pronounce.

By seventh grade, though, Bissett already knew she wanted to model. She convinced her parents (who own a glass company in Kent) to use her college fund to pay for modeling classes in Seattle.

"We were hoping she'd outgrow it," said her mother, Linda.

Bissett did, but only after leaving Thomas Jefferson High School in Federal Way during her junior year. She moved to Japan to model sportswear and cosmetics, then bounced to Los Angeles and discovered commercial acting. She was 17.

You probably have watched some of Bissett's early work: ads for Sprite soda, Sure deodorant, No Nonsense panty hose. She earned her Screen Actor's Guild card from her first commercial, playing a kid in the back seat of a Ford Aerostar.

At an audition for a commercial some time later, a manager asked Bissett if she had considered acting. She hadn't. Certainly not back at Jefferson High, where her only real extracurricular passion besides modeling was soccer.

In Los Angeles, she started taking acting lessons, but often had to miss class because of work. She kept landing paying parts.

"Book of Love" was her first big role amid several smaller ones, such as guitarist Bobby Krieger's wife in Oliver Stone's "The Doors."

Bissett became a sought-after face at the same time the TV networks were developing a pack of post-adolescent ensemble dramas. She auditioned for "Melrose Place" one afternoon, and got an offer quickly enough to cancel another interview scheduled later that day, for Fox's new college series "Class of '96."

"I really wanted `Melrose Place' because it was already on the schedule and because `90210' " - produced and created by the same team as "Melrose" - "was so big."

Bissett's mother and father, both 42, watched the first episode of "Melrose Place" from their matching side-by-side recliner-rockers pointed at the living room's big-screen TV.

"It was nice to turn on TV once a week and see her," said Linda. "We missed her."

"Melrose" has so far fallen short of the success of "90210," but Bissett is confident the show will be renewed in May for another season.

"Our ratings aren't great. But the demographics are, whatever that means. That's what the producers say."

Either way, Bissett appears to have no worries that her career will work itself out. She and her husband have talked about moving back to Seattle someday to produce films. Among other things.

"I've sort of mellowed out. It used to be: I want to be a star, do big movies. Now, being married, it's like the reasons I wanted to do that seem the wrong reasons. I want to have kids."

Handsome, photographable kids.