A conversation with Keri Russell

On Sunday, Jan. 30, CBS will air the Hallmark Hall of Fame production “The Magic of Ordinary Days.” The film is set in the 1940s and focuses on a young woman named Livy, who becomes pregnant by her G.I. lover and is married off to a farmer named Ray Singleton. It’s a marriage of convenience arranged by her father. But as time passes, these two “strangers” make a life-changing discovery about each other. The film’s stars include Skeet Ulrich (“As Good as It Gets”) as Ray, Mare Winningham (“The Boys Next Door”) as his sister, and Keri Russell (“Felicity”) as Livy.

Keri Russell says the one thing that struck her about her character, Livy Dunne, in “The Magic of Ordinary Days” was how extraordinary Livy was for a woman of her time.

“She was in graduate school, which was not a typical place for women to be in the 1940s,” Russell says. “It was during World War II, and she had had an affair with a soldier and had become pregnant, and her life changes completely: Her father, who is a very strict minister, finds someone who will marry her — take her far away — and raise her child. And, suddenly, this woman who obviously had had a great future ahead of her, finds herself married to someone she doesn’t know, probably could never love, and goes to live in some small place she never heard of.

“Livy and Ray are awkward with each other,” Russell says, “and can hardly bear to share the same space. But in time, she realizes that Ray, this quiet man who never speaks about his feelings, has come to love her. She realizes how much she needs to be loved, and this helps her see him in a different way. She starts to open up to him, and their relationship begins to change.”

Russell agrees that today, most women would be troubled by Livy’s acceptance of both the marriage and, essentially, of being sent into exile, far from her home, her family and her friends.

“But 60 years ago,” Russell says, “women had relatively few choices about how they wanted to live their lives, and an unmarried woman with a child had even fewer.”

Keri Russell has been busy since “Felicity” went off the air. She’s done a number of features, including “We Were Soldiers” and the soon-to-be-released “The Upside of Anger.” Russell recently wrapped the miniseries “Into the West,” which is scheduled to air later this season. She also made her off-Broadway debut in the hit production “Fat Pig” at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in New York.

“(The play) shows our obsession with how people look,” she says, “and how, in judging others by their appearance, we are also judging ourselves. … It’s very funny, and as you know, a lot of truth comes out of humor.”

Dial Tone

On Sunday, Jan. 30, A&E will air the film “See Arnold Run,” the story of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s rise from a poor childhood in Austria to become one of the world’s most popular film stars and the governor of California. Mariel Hemingway plays his wife, Maria Shriver, and Jurgen Prochnow (“Das Boot”) plays Schwarzenegger.