'Playboy Club' puts Conant grad one hop closer to stardom

Conant High School grad Katherine Cunningham remembers the first time she realized she was made of star material.

<i>Real</i> star material.

"In my first day of astronomy class, Mrs. Rausch, my astronomy teacher, told us how we were all made of star stuff," Cunningham said. "She was talking about actual stars and energy. She was a great storyteller."

Little did Mrs. Rausch (her first name is Suzanne, and she's been teaching at Conant since 1984) realize that someday the star material inside Cunningham would turn her into an actress.

The Elk Grove Village native can now be seen as the "door bunny," Kate, in NBC's "The Playboy Club." She enjoyed a brief appearance on an episode of the Showtime series "Shameless" and co-starred in a feature indie romance "Two Days in February," directed by Palatine filmmaker Michael Noens.

The 25-year-old Cunningham hasn't been around the acting block that many times, but she already knows the one quality that actors need to survive: self-esteem.

"Yeah, I think so. Absolutely," she said. "You've got to have good self-esteem if you want to stay sane. There are a lot of good actors out there who are probably very insecure.

"But it can drive you crazy. On a series set, they've taken away some of your lines, and you're like, 'Do they hate me? Did I do a bad job yesterday? Why did they cut my stuff?'

"Or you're not in the next episode. Or you're at an audition and the girl next to you looks just like you, only a little prettier, and you're like, '<i>Oh, no!'"</i>

On "The Playboy Club," Cunningham's character, Kate, started off as a one-shot appearance.

"I got really lucky because I don't think she was supposed to be recurring," Cunningham said. "She was supposed to have a couple of lines and be done. I got along really well with the director and he kept putting me in stuff. The producers really liked me and they put me in the rest of the series."

"The Playboy Club," which airs 9 p.m. Mondays, debuted Sept. 19 and is already filming its sixth episode. Cunningham appears in five of them. She just received the script for the seventh, and her door bunny - a bunny who greets people as they enter the club - is in that one, too.

The new show, set in the early 1960s, is filmed in Chicago, home to the very first Playboy Club. It stars Eddie Cibrian and Amber Heard, although many male viewers might argue the real stars of the show are the Playboy bunny suits.

"Wearing the bunny suit is incredible," Cunningham said. "It's tight, makes me sit up straight, gives me a sweet strut to my walk, and sometimes makes my legs numb, but that's due to a back injury. (Don't worry. They fixed that.) It makes me feel absolutely stunning, and empowered."

As "Playboy Club" fans know, every bunny wear a different color. The door bunny's color?

"It's orange, and oddly enough, because I have cuffs and collar, I feel like I'm dressed in a suit jacket," Cunningham said. "The bunny suit is gorgeous. I wish everything I wore made me feel that way."

The actress flirted with becoming a biologist for while, but the acting bug bit her hard.

"I love theater," she said. "I really love it."

What's the attraction?

"It feels so good to figure out why a person's feeling the way they're feeling," the actress said. "It actually makes me feel euphoric to figure out, step by step, how something works. When I figure it out, it's awesome. When I don't figure it out, it kind of destroys me a little bit until I do."

Cunningham paused for a moment, and added: "I would say it's a little bit of an addiction. Is that a bad thing to say?"

As a child, she made home movies in her basement. When she got to Conant High School, Cunningham signed up for improvisation, musicals and drama under teacher Marty Goughnour. Improv and drama lasted from 4 to 6 p.m., and the musical rehearsed from 6 to 9 p.m.

"That way I wouldn't have to go home," Cunningham said. "I would come home, go straight to bed, then wake up and go to school. I guess I was just bored at home. Musicals and drama were a way to stay at school for the longest possible amount of time."

Goughnour, a 31-year Conant veteran, easily remembered Cunningham.

"She came in the door as a powerhouse performer," Goughnour said. "It's not every day a freshman can come right in and command a lead in a production. She could do Shakespeare and everything else. She blew us away."

Cunningham performed in community theater productions with her older brother John and older sister Jillian, both Conant graduates.

"Community theater with my brother and sister, that was huge for me," she said. "I idolized my brother and sister. I still do. They're the most amazing people in the world to me. To do plays with them was probably the best part of my life."

Maybe. Maybe not.

After all, Mrs. Rausch's students are full of star stuff.

And you never know just how far that can carry a Conant grad.

Dann Gire and Jamie Sotonoff are always looking for suburban people in showbiz. If you know of someone, send a note to dgire@dailyherald.com and jsotonoff@dailyherald.com.

Bunny business

At Hugh Hefner's Playboy Club, there were different kinds of bunnies. The door bunny — the role Katherine Cunningham plays on the NBC TV show — would greet guests at the door. The cigarette bunny sold packages of cigarettes. And the bunny mother kept the other bunnies in line.