South Philly Review

If all the world is a stage, Mary Anne Claro is quite the director. On any given day, she's working to represent more than 840 actors and actresses from 6 months to 85 years old. She knows their strengths, their talents and their features -- each of which will help her direct them to the roles they are meant to fill.

She's been doing it for 33 years at 1513 Passyunk Ave., where her business, the Mary Anne Claro Talent Agency, has stood since 1974.

"Everybody I accept [to represent] becomes a part of my family -- I'm very family-oriented," she said. "I do not tell people they can do it if I don't think they can. I have no problem in telling people, 'Thank you for coming in, but we're not interested.'"

It's that tough-love approach that's earned her agency a great deal of success. Claro, 57, has placed clients in all realms of acting from television commercials to shows to film. They come from as far as New York and New Jersey and as close as down the street, where Claro -- whose real last name is a shortened version of her birth name Quagliariello -- spent a good deal of her childhood.

"I feel like I'm from South Philly. I practically live there," the now resident of Delaware County said. "I grew up in Southwest Philly, but was always in South Philly visiting my family. It seemed like the normal thing for me to do was to open up my business down there because I felt very comfortable."

She was a young entrepreneur -- only 24 when she opened the agency -- but knew she'd rather work for herself and left her jobs as director of modeling at The John Robert Powers Agency of Philadelphia and a part-time hairdresser.

"My job is to make it as convenient as I can for the casting directors," she said of booking her clients to audition for shows on all major television networks as well as commercials for local companies. "It's up to us as agents to make sure [the actors] are ready. If [an actor] messes up, [the casting director doesn't] say 'Who's his mother?' They say, 'Who's his agent?' It all comes back to me."

Claro's roots in entertainment go back to her days of modeling, which she started at 13.

"I always loved fashion," she said. "I was always into clothes and very particular about what I wore."

Claro was a frequent shopper of now-closed Sarah's Dress Shop, 2334 S. Broad St.

"One day when I was [there], they said, 'Why don't you model for us?'" she said. "They would do fashion shows and I used to be a top model. I did modeling for their print catalogs, too."

Standing at 5-foot-5, Claro was considered a junior model. Now, she said she wouldn't even be considered for the job.

"Today they want [women who are] 5-foot-9 in bare feet, and men 5-foot-11 to 6-foot-1," she said, adding she also did commercials for local department stores, a route that's still popular. "[Today models are] qualified to go and audition for commercials. With more training, they can qualify to audition for soap operas, which seems to be everybody's goal now. Working as an actor on a soap opera is so hard, much harder than doing film.

"Sometimes people criticize the actresses, they say they're so bad. But they don't get the new script until the night before [they shoot the episode] and they have to memorize it."

Regardless of what avenue her clients take -- and she's helped place them on soaps like "All My Children" and "One Life to Live" -- she's there to help.