She Played Jo On "The Facts Of Life." See Nancy McKeon ... - Best Life

When The Facts of Life—a spinoff of Diff’rent Strokes focused on an all-girls boarding school—returned for its second season in 1980, it was without four of its original cast members (including a young, brunette Molly Ringwald, who played Molly Parker). In their place arrived a surprising addition to the cast in the form of a motorcycle-riding Bronx-born tomboy named Jo Polniaczek.

During her seven seasons playing the rough-and-tumble Jo, Nancy McKeon would bring main characters Tootie (Kim Fields), Blair (Lisa Whelchel), and Natalie (Mindy Cohn) closer together (via the punishment the five received after stealing the school’s van to drink at a local bar); bicker with Blair; and intimidate men with her mechanical aptitude. Neither her acting career nor her ties to her Facts of Life co-stars would end with the show in 1988, however. Read on to find out what happened to McKeon in the decades that followed and where she is now at age 56.

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She passed up college to continue acting and direct a film.

In a 2012 Vanity Fair oral history of the series Friends, Lori Openden, former head of casting at NBC, revealed that the choice of who should play Monica Geller came down to just two actors: “Nancy McKeon, from The Facts of Life, also read for [Courteney Cox’s] part. She gave a terrific performance. [NBC President] Warren [Littlefield] let [co-creators] Marta [Kauffman] and David [Crane] make the call. They went off for a walk and came back and said Courteney.”

Instead, McKeon went on to star in her own sitcom, Can’t Hurry Love, which ran for one season in 1995 before being canceled despite solid ratings. She had another one-season run playing Midwesterner Jane Sokol alongside a Martha Stewart-esque Jean Smart on Style & Substance in 1998 before landing the role of Inspector Jinny Exstead on the Lifetime crime drama The Division, which she played from 2001 to 2004.

She put family first.

Following the end of Sonny With a Chance in 2011, McKeon left screens until 2018, when she returned as a contestant on Season 27 of Dancing With the Stars, competing with pro Val Chmerkovskiy. She followed that appearance with a cameo in the Lifetime movie You Light Up My Christmas starring former Facts of Life co-star Fields. In her most recent role, McKeon played the mother of a teen participating in a dangerous post-high school competition in the 2021 Amazon Prime thriller Panic, based on the young adult novel series by Lauren Olivier.

She still considers her Facts of Life costars “sisters.”