Karen Leigh Sharp was born to a Tennessee Williams-esque emotionally unstable southern mother, Montine Powell (an orphan from Moultrie, Georgia), and to her fun-loving father, Robert Beckelhymer, from Chatsworth, California, an insurance underwriter, who brought the spark of play into their turbulent home in San Jose, California.

Karen’s stage debut (at the age of 6) was the role of an emotionally unstable queen, where she accidentally became hooked on the acting drug while blurting out her bottled-up emotions of sadness, anger and humor which instantly set her soul free.

With acting in her blood but no money to train, Karen decided her first job would be at a 6-screen drive-in movie theatre (hired to squirt soft drinks into cups). After her shift, she’d climb the scaffolding with her free tub of popcorn to the marquee to sit with the pigeons and study the actors' huge facial reactions and body language surrounded by 6 huge viewing screens, but no sound.

After graduating from CSU Fullerton in theatre, Karen moved to Hollywood Boulevard and Las Palmas Avenue, and instantly became a “struggling actor,” carried a stun gun, worked as a waitress, was an extra in The Champ, got an under five acting job on General Hospital, went into credit card debt by writing, producing and acting in her own music short, The Lady Drives a Scamp, and was cast as the emotionally unstable Blanche DuBois, in A Street Car Named Desire.

While building her regional theatre stage credits, Karen enrolled in acting class with Darryl Hickman, who changed her life while keenly dubbing her a “tragic-clown.” Darryl taught Stanislavsky’s System, the technique of working from one’s soul in order to create interesting and authentic characters.

In the late ‘80s Karen brought Crimes of the Heart (playing the enigmatic unstable sister, Meg) and 5 LA actors to the Sierra Mountains of California. At the end of that summer her acting buddies went back to LA, but Karen stayed to create an emotionally stable family living on 20-acres, which literally grounded her soul.

Karen continued to direct and act in award-winning regional theatre, location scouted for national television commercials, taught acting classes, earned a K-8 teaching credential and taught in the schools, acted in short films, wrote a one-act children’s play, Mary Brave Eyes (about white racism in rural America), and survived breast cancer, while never giving up on her dream of landing a lead role in a feature film. She did it, with Silvia, an emotionally unstable doctor. Karen Leigh Sharp knows it is never too late to achieve dreams, that there is no better therapy than being an actor and having a loving and healthy family is the most rewarding achievement of all.