THE BIZ : Late Bloomers

Jackie Hargrave plays a woman out on a date in an MTV rock video. Gordon Dixon stars in a cigarette commercial on German television. Vivian Spurgin’s gigs include a graveyard scene for an American Film Institute project, a KCET promo and a just-booked rock video.

Hargrave is 74. Dixon is 69. A cagey Spurgin says, “I play the age range from 60 to 70.” They’re some of the success stories from a commercial-acting class at the Claude Pepper Senior Center on La Cienega near Pico.

Adrienne Omansky founded the class a year ago, inspired by her mother’s late-blooming acting career. “I’d been taking her to auditions and saw a huge need for actors in this age group,” she says. Her mom, Celia Kushner, 80, counts McDonald’s and Miller Lite ads among her credits.

Omansky’s stage-daughter role extends to her students as well: She acts as their unpaid manager and preps them for auditions. “Seniors are no longer limited to acting in commercials for Geritol or Polident,” Omansky notes. “IHOP aired one with a senior dribbling a basketball.” But the weekly class does more than just get old folks on the tube: It also combats isolation. Marty Coggan, 75, whose disability confined him to a walker and a social life of visiting “doctors, doctors, doctors,” says the class “gave me a reason to go on with life.”