Some actors wait tables in New York for years before their big break arrives - if it ever does. Penelope Ann Miller broke all the way through to Broadway in well under two.
Miller landed a crucial role in “Biloxi Blues“ shortly after arriving in The Big Apple.
“I really wanted to be taken seriously,” says Miller, who moved from Los Angeles to New York as a young actress for a credibility boost.
“That opened up a lot of doors, people seeing me as a theater actress. It gave me a lot of opportunities I wouldn’t have had otherwise,” she tells WWTW.
Before long she was a staple on the big screen, starring in diverse films like “Awakenings,” “Kindergarten Cop” and “Carlito’s Way.”
Her latest feature casts her as the worried mom of Corbin Bleu, the teen heartthrob from the “High School Musical” franchise.
The 45-year-old actress, now starring in the motor cross drama “Free Style,” is used to sharing the screen with larger than life actors. It’s not every actress who can say she worked alongside the likes of Al Pacino, Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.
Pacino was “more playful and funnier than I anticipated,” she says, while De Niro proved much more shy than his screen persona.
Brando, with whom she worked on “The Freshman,“ “was a real prankster. People think of him as a recluse. Not at all.“
Film roles started drying up in the late ’90s, forcing her to concentrate on television projects.
“Very early on I had a nice trajectory of working all the time … a hot streak,“ she says. When she hit her 30s, those roles started going to her 20-something peers.
Actresses often dread turning 40 - and with good reason given Hollywood’s appetite for younger and younger starlets Miller is doing her best to defy that cliché.
She landed a role in Rob Reiner’s next project, “Flipped,” shortly after the birth of her second daughter earlier this year, and she’s already shot the upcoming film “Robosapien: Rebooted.”
Her next television gig casts her as Ray Romano’s ex in the new TNT dramedy “Men of a Certain Age.”
“I’m considering my baby a good luck charm,” she says. “Now, the roles are finding my niche again.”
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I'm an award-winning journalist and film critic with more than a decade of experience in newspapers, magazines and the Web. I'm a member of both the Washington, DC Area Film Critics Association and the Denver Film Critics Society.
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