When Sabine Singh Decided to Listen to the Universe, She Heard The Siren Call of AMC

Sabine Singh (Greenlee, ALL MY CHILDREN) tells the story better, but in the interest of space, we’ll give you the CliffsNotes version. In 1960, her father, who was born a Maharaja in Pakistan but came of age in refugee camps after the Partition of India, set sail for America on a cargo ship with 100 borrowed dollars in his pocket. Dad, who his daughter fondly describes as “like an Indian Regis Philbin,” ultimately built a fortune stateside in the insurance industry. Her Austrian-born mother, meanwhile, had settled in Chicago after World War II, earned her degree, and was teaching English in Japan and the Philippines when she went to New Delhi on vacation. At her hotel, she met Singh, in India visiting relatives. “And because of that,” concludes Singh with a flourish, “we’re drinking margaritas at Fiorella’s,” an Italian restaurant near the AMC studios.

Singh’s road to Pine Valley was, of course, not quite so direct. Her journey began in Suffern, NY, where her parents raised her and her younger sister, Schandra, an accomplished painter who finished first in her M.F.A. class at Yale. “It’s definitely a town that John Mellencamp would sing about,” she says of her childhood environs. “There was a left and a right side of the tracks and a big hill with a house on top of it with this crazy little Indian man and his German wife and their two children. We fit in, but we didn’t fit in. When other people were going to the Jersey Shore for Memorial Day weekend, we were going to India or China.”

The Singh sisters’ adventure-filled upbringing encouraged their artistic side, which suited their parents just fine. Although Mr. And Mrs. Singh had both chosen practical careers, they had their own creative predilections. “In India, where they don’t let women act, my father played Portia in The Merchant of Venice. He’s very proud of that! My mom is a painter and a singer and such a creative mother. I was the one whose birthday parties had scavenger hunts and puppet shows. As immigrants coming to America, they really had the idea of, ‘We’re going to work very hard to give our children everything they want,’ and my dad was big on letting his children do what they wanted to do. Which, for me, from an early age, was performing.”

Singh trained as an actress in the U.S. and abroad, graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Post-college, “I was cleaning theaters and playing Wow the Dog in a play downtown,” she recalls. “Wow was half-dog, half-puppet.” That’s who she was as an artist (“and still am, I hope!”) – so it was a shock to her avant-garde sensibilities when, just a few years later, she found herself clad in a bikini in a two-episode arc as Anna Evans on DAWSON’S CREEK. Going through her head, she says, was “I don’t want to be that girl in a bikini on DAWSON’S CREEK. There was a lot of discomfort there.

“I never was a pinup girl, never a model,” Singh says of the uphill battle she faced to be considered for serious roles. “I never wanted to be beautiful or a sex object. I’ve been professionally auditioning for 10 years, and it’s really only in the last three years that I’ve had a manager and an agent and close friends who’ve seen my potential and believe in me, who aren’t saying, ‘Oh, Sabine, just take your shirt off for this [project],’ people who saw beyond ‘cute, bubbalicious, blonde girl.’ When I look back in time at the choices I’ve made, there are so many roles I was offered… I could have been Tara Reid. I could have taken my shirt off, but it just never interested me. And whenever I’ve found myself compromising and doing something I didn’t want to do, believing it was helping me get to the next place” – that CREEK gig being a perfect case in point – “it never really did.”

Unsurprisingly, given this backstory, she’d never been open to making a home in daytime. “I was this person going, ‘It’s not arty,’” she acknowledges. ALL MY CHILDREN only entered her vocabulary after ringing in 2007 with friends in Martinique, when she made this New Year’s resolution: “to listen to the universe, to truly be open to the opportunities that come my way.” Singh felt called to service. (“I realized that my purpose in life was to listen and to take care of others”) and to that end, she applied to Columbia’s master’s program in social work. 

“Back in January,” she elaborates, “I told my manager, ‘Hey, listen, I have to make some money so I can pay for grad school. Let’s send me out for a soap in New York; I’ll work during the day and go to school in the evening.’ He said, ‘Oh, ALL MY CHILDREN is casting for something next week.’ I said, ‘Great, send me out on it.’ This was going to be my fund money for my higher education so I could go pick berries in Turkey!” she marvels. “I was going to build huts for the people of Sri Lanka!”

Needless to say, Greenlee’s front-and-center status means that school – and the berries and the huts – are on hold. And though she struggles with Greenlee’s obstinance (“She’s told 27 times that Ryan doesn’t love her and every time, she goes running back to him…”) and with the messages her character sends (when the script called for Greens to say, “Let Annie be a schoolteacher or a nurse, I just don’t want her to work at Fusion,” Singh fought – successfully – to make the dig less sexist), she’s more than happy with the trade-off. “Aside from artistic creativity and consistency, I was looking to enjoy where I go and what I do,” she says, calling AMC “the best thing that ever happened to me. Except for, like, those times that you meet someone that you’re so blessed to meet… and my dog. I wish Greenlee was a little nicer,” she shrugs, “but I’ve got three more years to work on it. Three more years with the writers, right? To find out what Barbara [Esensten] and Jim [Harmon Brown, AMC’s head writers] drink and send them a bottle weekly.”

JUST THE FACTS
Birthdate: “August 4, 1974, was the day the world started celebrating… or mourning. We haven’t decided which.”
Provenance: Suffern, NY. “Lots of bodies were buried there on THE SOPRANOS and Aidan’s country house was there on SEX AND THE CITY, where Carrie couldn’t get cell phone service. We do have cell phone service, but we don’t have farmers that hot! If we did, I’d still be there, raising my little farm children.”
What Happens In Vegas: Though Singh did an episode of LAS VEGAS, which stars Josh Duhamel, who played Greenlee’s husband Leo on AMC, the didn’t share scenes. “I saw him, though, and he was really cute!”
Musical Notes: Singh is a devotee of the folk duo Indigo Girls. “I’ve seen them probably 22 times. I’m the one who gets the e-mail that says ‘Sabine, Amy and Emily are coming to town, do you want to hand out flyers?’ And every year, no matter where he’s playing, I take my mother to see Neil Diamond.”

THE BUDDY SYSTEM
“One of my most amazing friends, one of the loves of my life, is Emmanuelle Chriqui,” says Singh of the actress best known as Sloan on ENTOURAGE. “About nine years ago, she was visiting me in New York and she said, ‘Sabine, Lionel [her boyfriend] has this friend and I swear to God, I didn’t even understand how to explain “perfect” unless you meet him.’” Mr. Wonderful’s name? Cameron Mathison (Ryan). “I was all, ‘Excuse me, I’m just finishing up with Oxford, he’s on a soap opera?’ But I love Emmanuelle so much, I was like, ‘Well, okay, set it up.’ But Cameron had just begun dating Jennifer Esposito and word got back to me that he was dating someone. When I went to my screen test, right before Cam and I started to say our lines, I put it together: ‘Wait. Cameron, Cameron on a soap. Are you Emmanuelle and Lionel’s Cameron?’ And he was like, ‘Are you Emmanuelle and Lionel’s Sabine?’ This business is a hard world to find family in, but Emmanuelle and Lionel are family to me, and to know that Cameron came from that same family tree… It was so much easier to be vulnerable because I knew he would take care of me.”

DID YOU KNOW?
*Both Singh and her mother have pilot’s licenses. This self-portrait was taken during the actress’ first solo flight.
*THE COLBERT REPORT’s Stephen Colbert and his writing partner, Paul Dinello, created the role of Yasmine Sarong for Singh on the cult fave COMEDY CENTRAL sitcom STRANGERS WITH CANDY.
*Every summer, Singh travels to an ashram and takes a 10-day vow of silence. “No one who knows me believes I can actually do it for 10 days, but I do!”

CAPTION:
Bond Girls: “I have a crush on her in real life,” raves Singh of Alicia Minshew (Kendall). “She’s been so fabulous to me, such an angel, and that means even more now that I understand how close she is to Rebecca [Budig, ex-Greenlee].”

CAPTION:
World Tour: Singh with her father Anand and little sister Schandra on a family trip to India.

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