A place for her

Wanting to study musical theater after high school, Annie found it difficult to find a degree program. It was while performing West Side Story in summer stock at Jefferson University that the young thespian decided where she wanted to attend college: Millikin University in Decatur, Ill.

“The guy who was playing Tony was currently going to Millikin, so that’s how I heard about it,” she says. “It was great because it was away from home but not too far ÐÐ about an hour and a half.”

In college, Annie broadened her performance horizons. In addition to acting, she studied voice; ballet, jazz and tap dancing; and took a class in stage combat. By the time she’d earned her bachelor’s of fine arts in 1999, Annie had loaded down her resume with a variety of skills such as burping on cue, facial contortions and several dialects, including Cockney, Southern and Slavic.

Annie says her mother always supported her choice of studies, and she didn’t worry much about being a waitress waiting for her big break as she went from audition to audition. In fact, she’d lined up her first post-college job, touring with Anything Goes, before graduation.

“It’s hard to remember what my mindset was back then. You get comfortable with rejection. You try out and just move on,” she says. “It’s a necessary skill to have in this business or else you’ll be very, very defeated.”

Annie’s first real role after settling down in California was as Swing in A Class Act at the Pasadena Playhouse. Do I Hear a Waltz? soon followed.

“When I got out here, I didn’t have one on-camera credit on my resume,” she says. “I think I’d done one Sears commercial in Chicago, which doesn’t count.”

But when she went to see a live taping of the short-lived NBC sitcom Stark Raving Mad, starring Tony Shalhoub and Neil Patrick Harris, Annie knew she wanted more. The ability to do a sitcom would satisfy her desire to act before a larger audience, but the live taping provided the immediate gratification of the audience’s applause.

“I was like ‘Oh my God, this is exactly it!’ I was doing TV, but there was still a live audience because you came out and took a bow, and this was like the perfect melding of the two,” she says.