Actress hits target with cop role

By George Lang

Published: August 31, 2006

Six years after moving to New York and becoming a Broadway star, Milena Govich found herself back in her native Norman this summer, pumping bullets into a firing range target.

The 29-year-old singer, dancer and actress needed to know how to draw a 9 mm pistol, so she turned to her uncle, retired Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper Jerry Green, and her cousin, Sgt. Blake Green of the Norman Police Department.

Her new job required it because, as an announcer has told viewers since 1990:

“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police who investigate crime, and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders.”

This is Milena Govich’s story.

On Sept. 22, Govich debuts on NBC’s “Law & Order” as Detective Nina Cassaday, the first female detective character (S. Epatha Merkerson has played the captain of detectives since 1993) on the longest running current drama on television. As part of her new duties, she will be peering around corners in tenements and pursuing suspects on foot, so Govich needed to add a few more skills to her long list of talents.

“I sing. I play instruments. I never dreamed I would be going to my uncle Jerry and my cousin Blake for coaching,” Govich said in a phone interview from her Manhattan apartment.

“She’s a very fast study,” said Jerry Green, a 31-year veteran of the highway patrol who is now the executive pilot for the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety. “In two days, she was at the point most people are at in two weeks.”

This seems to be a pattern. Her parents, University of Central Oklahoma professor Marilyn Govich and the late University of Oklahoma professor Bruce Govich, were both performers and voice teachers, and they exposed their daughter to arts at an early age. The young Milena and her brothers, Mateja and Nikola, frequently would be in the house when her parents’ doctoral voice students would show up for lessons.

“I learned so much just from osmosis just by being around young actors and singers,” she said.

Her mother would arrange for Milena to attend ballet recitals. “She had a tutu and a diaper,” Marilyn Govich said in a recent interview. “She was always captivated by it.”

All three Govich siblings became successful stage performers. Milena joined Norman Ballet Company in elementary school, learned piano and violin, and took voice classes from her father, who sang the National Anthem at Sooner football games for 22 years. She said that Bruce Govich taught her how to use her voice and also how to conduct herself professionally.

“If I wanted a voice lesson with my dad, I had to schedule an appointment,” she said. “At the time, I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But it was to make sure I was serious, that I was committed to learning and I wasn’t taking it for granted.”

Govich double-majored in performance and a premedical track at UCO, with minors in dance and violin. In 1997, two years before she graduated, she joined the Lyric Theatre ensemble, where she appeared in “Man of La Mancha” — her mother performed in a 1971 Lyric production of the same play.

After graduating with honors from UCO, she had to decide between performing or pursuing a medical career.

“But there just came a point where I said, ‘In spite of all these things ... I have to give performing a try, or else I’ll probably regret it,’ ” she said.

When Govich was growing up, she heard plenty of New York stories. Many of her parents’ students had bought one-way tickets to New York, hoping to get their names in “Playbill” and become stars of the Broadway stage. She said her parents made sure she heard about both the victories and the defeats.

On Jan. 10, 2000, Govich boarded a one-way flight to New York. But she never cleared a table at a deli, drove a cab or was forced to rent a subdivided basement with no hot water. Within a month, she won a role singing in a European tour of “The Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber,” and that summer she joined a national tour of “Cabaret” as one of the Kit Kat Girls.

This led to the Broadway production of “Cabaret” at Studio 54, where she served as first understudy for the role of Sally Bowles. Her brother Mateja was also in the cast, and one night, when Milena was filling in for Brooke Shields, Marilyn Govich was in the audience, watching two of her children on Broadway together.

“Here’s this terribly depressing show about the coming of the Holocaust, and I’m sitting in the audience smiling,” she said. “It was an indescribable experience.”

A revival of the Rodgers and Hart musical “The Boys from Syracuse” followed, along with roles in the soap operas “Guiding Light” and “As the World Turns.” She also earned guest roles in the prime-time series “Rescue Me” and “Love Monkey,” but it was her role as assistant district attorney Jessica Rossi on “Law & Order” creator Dick Wolf’s short-lived Spring 2006 NBC series “Conviction” that caught the most attention.

While that show didn’t last, Govich impressed the producers, and soon she was being called up to what “Law & Order” staff members call “the mother ship.”

“When it became official that NBC was not going to renew ‘Conviction,’ they had apparently been thrilled with my work, and I got a phone call the next day, saying, ‘We’re not letting you go anywhere,’ ” Govich said.

“They were like, ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to find something else for you. We want you to stay on our team.’ As an actor, that’s the kind of affirmation you dream of.”

Her character, Nina Cassaday, a freshly minted Queens-born detective from a family of police officers, will be a new partner for Ed Green (Jesse L. Martin). For several weeks, Govich did not know the name of her character — when a show bases much of its plots on stories “ripped from the headlines,” names must be heavily vetted for any legal complications. Once a character name is chosen, they have to make sure there is no one in the New York area with this name who works in any capacity with the New York Police Department or any of the other agencies in New York, she said.

Now, in addition to making her uncle and cousin proud of her firearms proficiency, she must go toe-to-toe with established regulars on “Law & Order” such as Sam Waterston and Merkerson. In addition, the shadow of the late Jerry Orbach, another actor who made his mark on Broadway before becoming a “Law & Order” fixture, looms large for Govich.

“I’m filling big shoes,” she said. “I’m going to be working with people who have been doing this for years, like Sam Waterston, Epatha and even Jesse has been on the show for seven years now. I’m going to be getting more osmosis training. It’s going to bring my own skills up.

“I want to walk in being able to live up to everyone else who’s around me,” she said.

Jerry Green, her uncle, said that Govich not only learned how to hold a weapon like a police officer, but that her aim was dead-on. His words could easily describe the trajectory of Milena Govich’s career.

“She was hitting what she was shooting at,” Green said.

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