Pasadena, Calif. ? Tammy Blanchard is excited. She thinks she’s spotted a famous singer on the patio of an elegant hotel. It’s a case of mistaken identity, but it provided a bit of fun on a sunny afternoon.

It was perhaps a reminder that Blanchard is somewhat new to stardom. Just last year, she won a supporting-actress Emmy as the young Judy Garland in the ABC miniseries “Life With Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows.” Her co-star Judy Davis won a best-actress Emmy as the grown-up Garland.

Much has been made of Blanchard’s longtime enthusiasm for Garland. Her first school play was “The Wizard of Oz,” and her first solo was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”

“It was so amazing  I couldn’t have been more than 8,” she recalled. “I had this uncanny desire that I had to get the part and I stood up to the piano and I sang it and from then on I just always wanted to perform, sing and dance, act.”

Part of that desire was because her family life was fractured, but when she sang onstage, “they were happy, like everything was OK, everyone was proud, everybody celebrating.”

The 25-year-old Blanchard brings her Christian faith into the conversation almost immediately, as she explains her quick attraction to Lifetime’s “We Were the Mulvaneys,” an adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates’ novel that will air at 8 p.m. Monday.

She plays devoutly religious Marianne, whose date-rape shatters the bonds of a loving rural family.

“I cried when I was reading the script,” she said. “It was very touching to me how this family went through so much pain and suffering and in the end came together again and survived.

“I was very inspired by her strength  the worst violation in the world I think is rape. To see this little girl use her faith, which I also have, to get her by and to stand strong affected me so much.”

She pauses for a long moment before describing how she was able to deal with the rape sequence. “I thought to myself, ‘OK, this is important because there are girls out there who went through this, so I can’t fake this. I really have to feel this, I really have to feel like I am being violated at that point.”‘

Blanchard believes it also was difficult for Shawn Roberts, who plays the high-school football player who assaults Marianne.

“After we did the scene, he was so upset himself he was almost crying. But we handled it, we both handled it well,” she said, crediting Peter Werner for directing in a way that made her feel “very protected.”

Despite the dark story line, she believes viewers will get “a sense of how powerful they can be no matter what happens to them. I think they will realize, which I believe, young girls have the strongest spirits in the world.”