TV Talk: Uniontown High grad born to play Dyan Cannon on HBO’s ‘Winning Time’

Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.

HBO’s “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty” (9 p.m. Sunday) is all about the rise of sports as entertainment, which the 1980s Lakers took to a new level when they established a courtside celebrity row stocked with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Dyan Cannon.

“Dyan Cannon is the No. 2 Lakers fan of all time,” said actress Caitlin O’Connor, a 2007 Uniontown High School grad. “She still attends the games at age 87. She’s hardly ever missed a home game. I sat front row at a Lakers game three times this past season, and she was there all three times. She was very friendly.”

O’Connor looked no further than her own mirror to see she was born to play Dyan Cannon in HBO’s chronicle of the Lakers’ rise to prominence in the NBA.

“I submitted to the public casting because I knew I looked like her,” O’Connor said in a phone interview a day before the actors’ strike began in July.

O’Connor’s Cannon was more of a glorified extra in season one, seated in Celebrity Row alongside Jack Nicholson (Max E. Williams).

“In most of the episodes during the game scenes, you can see us where they sit at the real Lakers games,” O’Connor said.

But in this weekend’s fifth episode of season two, O’Connor is credited as a guest star as Cannon interacts with Jerry Buss (John C. Reilly), who makes a joke using the title of Cannon’s 1978 movie “Heaven Can Wait.”

“Heaven can wait, but I’m not sure I can,” Buss says in the script for the episode.

“Then we do a little kiss,” O’Connor said. “The second beat is kissing Adrien Brody (who plays Pat Riley) on the cheek during a moment when he enters into Celebrity Row. I’m 90% positive that’s also in episode five.”

A Los Angeles native, O’Connor moved to Uniontown at age 5. She returned to Los Angeles to study English at UCLA (Class of 2011), where she also got her first modeling job in a UCLA Bruins apparel catalog. Then she got cast as Sleeping Beauty at Disneyland.

Acting gigs followed, including as the girlfriend of Charlie’s daughter (Amber Tamblyn) on the series finale of “Two and a Half Men.”

O’Connor also had roles in episodes of “Key and Peele” and “Tosh.0.” She was also the “ringcard girl” in filmed-in-Pittsburgh movie “Southpaw.” More recent roles include an upcoming BET movie, “Stay Out,” and a sci-fi thriller starring Chuck Lidell.

“I’ve always had three very steady streams of income as a model-­TV host, actress and film producer,” said O’Connor, a producer on the movies “Electric Love” and “Val.” “My supplemental income has always been from social media. I do brand deals and modeling jobs, and you attach the photo shoots with a social media post for a contract pay. I first realized I was doing well at it when Bloomberg’s Businessweek called me for an interview. I thought I was struggling until then.”

O’Connor said a photo shoot might pay $2,500-$3,000 with extra pay for a paid post, so a $2,500-$5,000 day as a model.

“You book a few of those a month and you’ve paid your mortgage and your bills,” O’Connor said. “Instagram has been very lovely to me.”