We met in a bar in Vegas. He didn’t know I was an actress. I didn’t know he had a castle.
It’s the sort of thing you can imagine happening to Rayanne. The bar in Vegas, certainly, though I like to hope that Rayanne eventually got sober, because it feels as though the other alternative for her is actually dying because she wouldn’t necessarily have an Angela there to save her life next time. But being so interesting and vivacious that you’d have to talk to her and only later discovering that the person you were talking to was distantly related to the Crusader kings of Jerusalem and the French royal line and so forth. The kind of person who is the nineteenth anything hereditary.
Not bad for a girl from Columbus, Ohio. Young Allison Joy Langer moved to the San Fernando Valley at age five. Three years later, she would become the only girl on a baseball team, and to be less “girly,” she started going by her initials. She met Ernie Lively, an actor with the kind of career where even IMDb can’t come up with characters you might remember. He became her acting coach, and she started a minor television career of her own. In 1990, she appeared on The New Dragnet. She played Dabney Coleman’s daughter and Brittany Murphy’s sister on the short-lived comedy Drexell’s Class. She was on what I can only assume was a pair of very special episodes of Blossom.
She auditioned to be Angela Chase. She didn’t get the part, so she auditioned again, this time for Rayanne Graff. It’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role. Rayanne was a prime example of neglected Generation X. Her mother was a nurse, I believe, and she worked long hours and still actively dated a lot. Rayanne’s father was out of the picture and barely communicated with her at all. Rayanne was bright, brittle, and wild. She had an obvious desire for a father figure, but it’s also clear she wanted a mother a little more supportive than Amber.
It’s frankly unjust that Langer didn’t have more offers after My So-Called Life went off the air. She did a few shows where she was either a recurring character or a regular, but either the show was short-lived or else her character was killed or similar. She’s a more talented actress than other women her age who have gotten more roles—it has been thirty years and I still weep when she’s rehearsing Our Town with Angela filling in as the Stage Manager. Sure, it’s Rayanne acting, but it’s Langer acting as Rayanne.
You can actually listen to the current Countess of Devon explain how she got from Hollywood to Powderham Castle to Mary Berry, if you’ve a mind. Exploring her husband’s castle was quite an adventure for her, it seems. Presumably she was at the coronation, but it’s clear when she talks to Mary Berry that the idea of such a thing had never occurred to her. (The special was filmed in 2017.) She seems to be using her status to do things like promote fibromyalgia awareness—she suffers from it herself—and help out local Devon charities. It seems as unreal to her as it was to me when I heard about it. From making Brian Krakow unsure how he feels to helping the disabled of Devon. What a world.