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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Penelope Ann Miller loves bringing her daughters to the set these days.

That wasn’t always possible for Miller, the fair-haired stunner who previously starred in edgy, adult fare like “The Relic, “Carlito’s Way” and “The Messengers.”

But Miller, who gave birth earlier this year to her second daughter, now finds herself playing more “mom” roles in film and television projects.

“Free Style,” opening tomorrow (Oct. 9), casts Miller as a single mom trying to do right by her motor cross racing son (“High School Musical’s” Corbin Bleu).

“She’s not perfect. The fact that [Bleu’s character] has to be the man of the house at an early age … there’s guilt that comes into that,“ Miller tells WWTW.

“Free Style” freely targets a youthful demographic, but it has more on its mind than just dreamy close-ups of its leading man.

“It’s not fluff,” Miller says, referring to one throwaway moment when Bleu’s on-screen sister asks him if they’re black or white. Their estranged father is black.

“We’re wack,” Bleu’s character answers with a smile.

“This could be a new little term people can use from a mixed backgrounds,” she says.

Miller has nothing but praise for young Bleu, an actor on the cusp of a big screen career following the breakaway smash “High School Musical 3.”

“He’s talented and a triple threat,” she say, adding the young man also is close to his parents. That should serve him well as more doors open to him.

“He’s not going to be one of those kids in the tabloids getting arrested,” she says.

Tomorrow: Miller recalls working with her previous co-stars, including Al Pacino, Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro.

(Photo: Corbin Bleu as Cale, Penelope Ann Miller as Jeanette, and Madison Pettis as Bailey in “Free Style.” – Photo credit: Marcel Williams / Samuel Goldwyn Films)

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