From Jehovah's Witness to Hollywood actress

The actress has created a new life outside the church's strict system of beliefs, "and she's making it work for her," [film director Matthew Van Vlack] said. Dever has transformed herself from a sheltered St. Charles [MO] teenager forbidden from celebrating her birthday or attending prom into the celluloid star of horror flicks such as "Sasquatch Hunters" and "Mangler Reborn."

The Jehovah's Witnesses, which began as a small Bible study group near Pittsburgh in 1872, has more than 6.5 million Witnesses around the world. ... Witnessess consider holidays such as Christmas and Easter pagan-influenced corruptions of biblical Christianity, and the Pledge of Allegiance idolatry.

At Willie M. Harris Elementary School in St. Charles, Dever often felt like the strangest kid in her class. Witness doctrine did not allow her to recite the pledge with her classmates or celebrate birthdays and other holidays with friends. She also couldn't participate in many after-school activities, such as plays or sports.

"School was weird for me," she said. "Whenever it was someone's birthday, I had to sit in a room by myself while everyone else had cake. I couldn't draw Christmas trees or turkeys for Thanksgiving."

The church discourages Witness parents from sending their children to college, Kissell said.

"Obviously among Jehovah's Witnesses, there are people with a good education," he said. "But in view of the atmosphere at many universities and colleges today ... many families decided to do something else with their children's education, to help them have a skill that will allow them to provide for themselves but also keep them away from an atmosphere that is not helpful morally."

Dever was not allowed to attend college, so she went to work for TWA after high school. A year or two later, in 1998 (since Dever set up shop as a Hollywood actress she has shed her Midwestern, devil-may-care attitude about revealing her age), a former TWA boss offered her a job in Orange County, Calif., licensing feature films to airlines. She jumped at the chance. She relished a change of scenery, and the job would put her a step closer to her dream: acting in the movies.
But Dever's wish for stardom was in direct conflict with church teaching, which, according to Church literature, says that Witnesses "avoid being excessive in the pursuit of wealth, pleasure or prominence."
...
Walking away from the Witnesses
Dever had no friends outside the church and so nowhere to turn for support or advice about her decision. Instead, she devoured books about acting, hoping for a career in film.
In October 2001, she finally made the leap to Los Angeles, leaving the church and everything she once knew behind.
...
"I kept thinking, 'If everything I was told up to this point in my life was a lie, what's true now?'" she said.
...
But Dever's major project is a screenplay about people she knows best: those too afraid to leave the church, the people she loved and ultimately lost when she walked away from the Witnesses. The screenplay follows several Witness friends as they struggle with the tensions between their lives in the church and in the outside world. Dever is finishing a final draft and hopes to meet with producers in coming months.
"I don't want to come across as angry in the screenplay, because I'm truly not," Dever said. "And I don't want to be exploitative or condemn anyone."

It's no surprise if she's a mixed-up little girl, even at the ripe-old (by Hollywood standards) age of 28.

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