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Darlene Vogel

Born in Modesto on October 25, 1962, Darlene Vogel has worked across film, television and modeling, building a screen career that moves from science fiction and action to police drama and daytime soap opera. Vogel made her feature-film debut in 1989’s Back to the Future Part II. She played Leslie “Spike” O’Malley, a member of Griff Tannen’s gang in the movie’s futuristic version of 2015. It is a relatively compact part, but one tied to one of the film’s most distinctive settings and its memorable group of future troublemakers. She later returned to that world as Heather, an IFT intern featured in the pre-show segment for the 1991 Universal theme-park attraction Back to the Future: The Ride. Her other film work includes Ski School, Ring of Steel and Angel 4: Undercover, reflecting the variety of genre projects that shaped her screen résumé. Television, however, gave Vogel her most sustained roles. From 1996 to 1999, she played Officer Chris Kelly on the USA Network series Pacific Blue. The part became one of her best-known performances and placed her at the center of the show’s police-drama action. Vogel then joined the soap opera One Life to Live as Dr. Melanie Farrell McIver, appearing from January 2000 through October 2001. The role added daytime drama to a career already comfortable with episodic television and genre storytelling. Across the rest of her television work, Vogel appeared as a guest on shows with notably different tones, including Full House, Northern Exposure, Boy Meets World, Farscape and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Taken together, those credits show an actor able to move between comedy, drama, science fiction and procedural television without being confined to a single type of role.