Melinda Clarke

Melinda Clarke is an American actress who has built a career across television, film, and podcasting. She is perhaps best known for playing the dominatrix Lady Heather in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the devious Julie Cooper in The O.C., and the ruthless Amanda Collins in Nikita. Her career began in the late 1980s with a role on the soap opera Days of Our Lives, where she played Faith Taylor from 1989 to 1990. She followed in her father's footsteps; John Clarke was a professional actor who starred on Days of Our Lives for decades.

Born in Upland, California, and raised in Dana Point, Clarke graduated from Dana Hills High School in 1987. She moved to Los Angeles at 18 to pursue acting and modeling. Her father was an actor and her mother was a ballet dancer. She has a brother named Joshua and a sister named Heidi, who died in 1994. Clarke married Ernie Mirich in 1997, and they have a daughter, Catherine, born in 2000. She is a trained soprano.

Clarke has taken on a wide variety of roles. In the 1990s, she played a zombie in Return of the Living Dead 3 and an assassin in Spawn. She also voiced the Amazon Queen Velasca in Xena: Warrior Princess, a character so popular that a toy figure was made of her. Later, she appeared in Star Trek: Enterprise, Charmed, Firefly, and Chuck. From 2021 to 2023, she hosted a podcast called Welcome to the OC, Bitches, and she is working on a sequel podcast with her daughter.