Kelli McCarty

Liberal, Kansas, is a long way from the entertainment industry, and the route McCarty took out of it was the pageant circuit. She won Miss Kansas USA and then Miss USA in 1991, becoming the first titleholder from her state. The victory gave her a national platform, a year of travel and a public identity that she would spend the next decade converting into an acting career.

At Wichita State she studied communications, joined Gamma Phi Beta and worked as an aerobics instructor. The combination of physical discipline and performance is revealing. Pageants reward poise, stamina and the ability to remain composed under scrutiny, all of which are useful for an actress. They also reward a certain kind of compliance, and McCarty's later career would be defined by her refusal to stay inside the role that the crown assigned her.

Winning Miss USA in 1991 made her a local celebrity and a national representative. The year that followed was a blur of appearances, travel and the strange etiquette of the pageant world. She has described the experience warmly, particularly the effect it had on her mother, but she has also been clear that the crown was a means rather than an end. She wanted to act.

The transition was gradual. Guest spots on established shows gave her a chance to learn on the job, and the Disney Channel recurring role on Even Stevens introduced her to a younger generation of viewers. By the time she joined Passions she had several years of small roles behind her. The soap offered something different: a steady job, a character with a long arc and the kind of daily discipline that only daytime television can teach.

Passions was never a conventional soap. Created by James E. Reilly, it mixed romantic melodrama with witchcraft, talking dolls and a town called Harmony that seemed to exist in its own supernatural dimension. Beth Wallace began as a grounded figure, the high school sweetheart of Luis Lopez-Fitzgerald, and gradually became one of the show's more unstable characters. McCarty played the shift with a straight face, which is the only way the role could work.

The character was killed in a train explosion in 2006, an exit that McCarty has described with amusement rather than regret. She was disappointed to leave, but she recognised the logic of soap opera: when a character goes mad, the writers eventually blow her up. The show itself ended in 2008, by which time she had already begun to think about what came next.

Her approach to Vivid was deliberate. McCarty wanted to make an adult film on terms she had set, not to be a guest in someone else's production. She negotiated a contract that gave her a say in casting, writing and editing, along with final approval. That level of control was unusual for any performer, let alone a mainstream actress entering the business for the first time.

The arrangement shaped the film. Faithless was built around a soap-opera premise, with McCarty playing a woman convinced that her husband is unfaithful. She has said she wanted the story to feel sexy and interesting rather than simply explicit, and she chose her co-stars partly on the basis of attraction. The result was a hybrid: a Vivid release with the pacing and emotional grammar of a television movie.

The release of Faithless in February 2009 produced a news cycle that McCarty was well equipped to handle. She had spent years doing press for Passions and the pageant circuit, and she understood how to give a quote. Her line about enjoying acting and sex, and seeing the film as a way to combine two passions, was repeated everywhere. It was frank, funny and exactly the kind of statement that turns a controversy into a story.

The coverage also carried a whiff of condescension. Much of it treated the crossover as a fall from grace, which McCarty resisted. She pointed out that she had approached Vivid, not the other way around, and that she had gone back to mainstream work afterwards. The two AVN nominations were a professional acknowledgement, but the more significant outcome was the demonstration that a mainstream actress could enter the adult industry without surrendering control of her image.

McCarty's post-acting career has been centred on photography. Her business serves portrait, wedding and boudoir clients, a choice that keeps her behind the camera rather than in front of it. The move is not as abrupt as it sounds. A performer who has spent decades thinking about lighting, framing and self-presentation is well prepared for the technical and interpersonal work of professional photography.

She has also made peace with the way her career is remembered. The pageant, the soap and the Vivid film are three acts in a single story about a woman who repeatedly changed the terms of her own visibility. That story is more interesting than the tabloid version, and McCarty tells it with the composure of someone who has long since stopped needing the crown.