A native Californian, attractive brunette Kelli Williams achieved a measure of small screen stardom as junior partner Lindsay Dole in the award-winning legal drama "The Practice" (ABC, 1997- ). Playing a recent law school graduate negotiating the perils and pitfalls of defending clients while her best friend serves as the prosecutor, the actress brought a strong sense of naivete tempered with the appropriate chutzpah. Although co-star Camryn Manheim had the flashier role, Williams proved just as capable, whether negotiating an inter-office romance or taking on her former mentor in court.
Williams began her acting career on the small screen, scoring a recurring role as the girlfriend of Christopher Daniel Barnes in the NBC sitcom "Day By Day" in 1989. Longforms followed, including her debut in "The Case of the Hillside Strangler" (NBC, 1989). She landed another recurring role as a girlfriend, this time as the high school sweetheart to the King in the ABC drama series "Elvis" (1989-90) before graduating to leads as a teenager coping with the end of an abusive relationship in "But He Loved Me" (CBS, 1991). Williams continued to hone her craft, appearing on stage in the comedy "Wrong Turn at Lungfish" (1992-93), alongside George C Scott and Tony Danza. After a string of guest appearances and other TV-movies (i.e., opposite Neil Patrick Harris in the based-on-fact "Snowbound: The Jon and Jennifer Stolpa Story", CBS 1994), the actress landed her first regular series role as an ambitious but untrained intern at a tabloid in the short-lived CBS drama "New York News" (1995). In the meantime, she had begun to land occasional film roles, including a prototypical flower child named Sunshine in "There Goes My Baby" (1994) and as the wife of a scientist (Jeremy Piven) in "Wavelength/E=mc2" (1995), although neither part was as three-dimensional as her role on "The Practice".