For actors of a certain age — and for women that can be any age beyond ingenue, when they can no longer pass for a grad student, an exotic dancer or Angelina Jolie’s kid sister — satisfying roles can be hard to come by. Even for well-regarded actresses.
So for those who self-impose restrictions on their career for the sake of family (and sanity), opportunities are further limited. Rule out theater work because it takes place at night and you can’t be home for your school-age children, rule out series television jobs that film in Los Angeles (most do), or rule out movies that don’t film locally (most don’t), and you can find yourself in career Siberia.
Yet New Canaan’s Anna Holbrook, who consciously placed all those limitations on herself, continues to get work, on her terms. With her athletic physique and cheerful, expressive voice, she can naturally pass for much less than her fifty-one years without the aid of fancy makeup, trick lighting or body doubles. An accomplished actress with a Daytime Emmy, a long list of Law & Order credits and a reputation for versatility, Anna has carved out a fulfilling career that complements the roles she most relishes: wife, mother and fully engaged member of the community in which she lives.
Her acting résumé reveals a career landscape as varied as a relief map of the United States — appropriate for someone who was born in Alaska, grew up in North Carolina and Arizona, and spent time as an adult in Oklahoma, California and Louisiana before coming to New Canaan fourteen years ago.
She planted a big kiss on Nick Nolte from the seat of a red sports car in the opening scene of 1994’s I Love Trouble; she played Sharlene Frame Watts Mathews Hudson Hudson on Another World between 1988 and 1997; and, in addition to her seven appearances in one Law & Order or another, she’s had guest spots on Spin City and The West Wing. You’ve heard her voice in educational series for PBS and Disney, and you’ve seen her in TV commercials: She’s been “Carol from Time-Life Books” and the Grape-Nuts lady (“Try it for a week!”) and has appeared in prominent national commercials for Claritin and Advil. “I’m not ready to do the laxative spots,” she laughs, “and I’m veering away from Viagra.”
Even though she’s often in New York City a couple of days a week auditioning for commercials, TV roles and voice-over work, Anna explains her situation early last year, with sincere modesty, as “basically not working.” Then, one spring day she was driving around town when she got a call offering her a role as psychiatrist Dr. Hannah Young on the ABC soap One Life to Live.
It was typical television happenstance: a job that could last a week, a month or forever (it ended up lasting less than two months). Yet when describing her response, she says, “You just look up and say, ‘Well, gosh, thanks!’” — each word inflected with the recognition of good fortune of someone who just found a silver dollar when she was only looking for her car keys.
Such thankfulness toward a profession that turns anxiety into neuroses has been hard earned, allowing Anna to achieve the balance that provides outlets for her many passions, personal and professional.
“Right now, in my life, I’ve made my choices,” Anna says, with the sureness of someone who’s already reaped the benefits. Those choices placed her career secondary to her husband of twenty-eight years, Bruce, a captain with Delta Air Lines; their daughter, Johanna, a junior at New Canaan High School; and their son, Henry, a sixth grader at Saxe Middle School. Of course, placing family above career hasn’t meant semiretirement.
“My priorities are so full. Good heavens,” she says mock dramatically, employing a favorite expression. “I never stop.” That’s why, according to Anna, her acting career is not a priority right now. Later? Who knows, she allows in her typical come-what-may tone. She may be in her acting prime, but she’s reluctant to relinquish her favorite role.
“Even though my kids are older,” she says, “sometimes when they’re older they need you the most.”
Anna was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, when her father, Don York, was stationed at Ladd Air Force Base. Don’s orders to go to Vietnam came when he was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. So Anna, her older brother, Mark, and her mother went to live in Asheville, North Carolina, where her parents grew up. Nearly a year into his tour as an adviser to the South Vietnamese military, Don was riding in the middle of a six-Jeep convoy when his was blown up. He was twenty-nine. Anna was almost six years old. Mark was eight.
Her mother, Anna says, “was never one to wallow, ever.” Among her gentleman callers, one, Jim Stephens, caught Anna’s attention, too. “I had a schoolgirl crush on him myself,” she recalls.
Jim was home from law school, visiting his family in Asheville, when he met Anna’s mother at a party. After a quick courtship (“They just knew,” Anna says), they married and moved to Tucson, where Jim, who adopted Anna and Mark, was finishing law school at the University of Arizona.
For Anna, now eight, Arizona was an adventure, the Wild West of her imagination come to life: long skirts, horses, cactus, and cowboys and Indians. She entered her teens enjoying singing, dancing and acting, so when TV westerns like Gunsmoke or High Chaparral came through town, she begged her mother to let her take part.
“I’d get on a bus with all the other extras, and I’d soak it up,” she says. “When everyone else would go get their box lunches, I wouldn’t move from the edge of the set. I wanted all of it.”
Yet back then, becoming an actor never seemed practical to her, “like a thing you’d go to school for. That,” she thought, “was silly.”
After high school in Tucson, Anna entered the University of Arizona as a nursing major; spent the following summer touring the United States with Up with People; and then went to Trinity College in San Antonio to study journalism, broadcast and film. “I had an inauspicious college career,” she admits. “I didn’t know what I wanted.”
By the end of one year at Trinity, though, she did know that she would marry Bruce Holbrook, who had been a year ahead of her at Tucson’s Santa Catalina High School, when he graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy the following year. They were married at the Air Force Academy Chapel in Colorado Springs in June 1979. Bruce’s first posting took him to Enid, Oklahoma. From there it was on to Merced, California, for B-52 training, and then Barksdale AFB in Shreveport, Louisiana. There Anna got a job as the secretary to the vice president of a local department store, earning $600 a month. “I thought that was going to be my life,” she says.
At Trinity College Anna had taken a class in photography, an avocation of her mother’s, and she had worked in camera shops in Tucson and Oklahoma. So in Shreveport she started doing her own photography. As she went around soliciting work, she mentioned that she also liked being on the other side of the camera. Pretty soon she was doing local TV commercials for $50 a spot, selling cars and hamburgers. That led to opportunities in Dallas, Texas, three hours away, where she eventually took acting classes.
“The people in the air force thought I was crazy,” she says. “Air force wives didn’t do these things. You stayed home, supported your husband, got ready for the next transfer and made babies.”
Around that time Anna was told she was the top commercial actress in Dallas. “If I’m at the top, there’s not much going on here,” she recalls thinking. She was playing Meg in a Shreveport community theater production of Crimes of the Heart when a New York agent passing through town suggested she give New York a try.
Although she was twenty-seven, past the age when actors typically take on New York, she left Shreveport in the summer of 1984 to see what the bright lights and big city could offer. “It kind of raised some eyebrows when the moving truck pulled in front of our house on the base and Anna left with the furniture, the dogs and our cat,” Bruce laughs. But as he puts it, “She had to do this.”
Within a few months, she and Bruce bought a small house in Bronxville. Bruce still had two more years remaining on his U.S. Air Force commitment, so until he landed a job flying for Delta Air Lines in 1986, he visited Anna for a long weekend every three weeks.
Her break came in 1988 when she was appearing Off-Broadway in St. Hugo of Central Park, a Jeffrey Kindley play in which she performed three different roles. “A hooker, a Jane Pauley type and somebody’s wife,” Anna recalls. “I think it was the first time somebody said, ‘Oh look, she can do anything.’ ”
While appearing in that play, she won a part on the NBC soap Another World. In her most recognized role, she played Sharlene Frame, a country widow with a teenage daughter. “I wore aprons and gingham dresses,” Anna remembers. The storyline was getting dry, notes Anna, until she showed up at an NBC Christmas party dressed like, well, not Sharlene. Soon thereafter she was given a split personality (“an actor’s dream”), which she played with gusto.
“She was so good at it and made it so realistic that it was difficult to be around her because Sharley was so obnoxious,” her love interest on the show, David Forsyth, once said in an interview.
In 1991 she left AW amidst a purge of veteran actors by NBC. Sharley’s fate was to be blown up at sea by her psychiatrist. However, since her body was never found, it allowed the show to bring her back in 1993, albeit with a brown wig and yet another personality.
Even though she won a Daytime Emmy in 1996 for Outstanding Supporting Actress, AW let her go a second time the following year. “It was painful at the time,” she remembers, “but they weren’t writing for me, so the handwriting was on the wall.”
Being cut loose became “my chance to play a little bit,” and she did a lot of auditioning. In 1998 she made it to the producer sessions for a new ensemble drama from John Wells, the executive producer of ER (and later, The West Wing). The show, Adversaries, pitting U.S. attorneys against public defenders, was to star Lou Diamond Phillips. Although Anna wanted the part badly, it stirred conflicting emotions since filming would take place in Los Angeles.
“I was going for it because I wanted it, but on the other hand I didn’t want it at all,” she says. “I wasn’t willing to turn the apple cart upside down on what is … a whim.”
As a result, in her final audition she “just choked,” leaving a familiar feeling she attributed to a fear of success. “I would sabotage myself, not intentionally. But all of a sudden, the stakes would be so high. Nerves would get hold of me, and I wouldn’t do well at the last minute.”
This led Anna to the realization “that when I was halfway in and halfway out, with one foot here and one foot there, I was never my best in either area.” Putting her best foot forward meant embracing home, family and New Canaan and spurning opportunity, dreams and Hollywood.
“For a long time,” Anna says, “I felt like I was a golden child. Everything that I’d ever planned was working out nicely: If you did A and B and C, you’d get D. Well, that’s not at all how it works, for anybody.”
What changed the dynamic for Anna were her children. Once she had Johanna in 1990 and Henry in 1996, “my work really, really was not something I had to do,” she says.
It was largely because of Johanna that Anna and Bruce ended up in New Canaan. A subtle shift of power was taking place at their small home in Bronxville, and once their daughter reached her twos, “it became Johanna’s house,” Anna explains. “So we had to move.”
Initially, Anna and Bruce considered New Canaan too far from the city. Then, on a snowy winter’s evening in 1993, Anna got a call from her real estate agent, telling her, “You’ve really got to see this house.” It was an 1850s colonial, and the minute Anna and Bruce walked through the front door, she remembers thinking, “Ooooh, we’re home.” A fire was roaring in the fireplace, the room on her right had warm, wood paneling, and she recognized the traditional Mexican tile on the kitchen floor from her days in Arizona.
Now, home is more than a house. She directed the South School Variety Show for three years, handing over the reins this spring, and since 2006 she has spent one night a week working with fifth and sixth graders at the Performing Arts Conservatory of New Canaan.
At home she likes to sing harmonies with Johanna, helping her daughter find her pitch while strumming a guitar she found on eBay. “She has many talents,” Johanna laughs.
Some of which haven’t been fully realized. Anna, at Johanna’s urging, would like to do a book on heirloom rings, or a children’s book based on the stories she told her children about her family’s pet goat in Arizona. She also can see herself directing.
“They’re little projects, but they’re ones that would bring me great joy,” Anna says. “I won’t go into them until I find the time. I feel like someday there will be some part of me that will have the time.”
Even the projects closest to her heart, whether they be about rings, goats, ferrets or dogs (the family’s eight-year-old golden retriever, Rosie, might be the best-behaved dog in Connecticut), will always be second to Bruce, Johanna and Henry, the primary beneficiaries of her love and passions.
“Her children don’t realize how lucky they are,” says Bruce, who characterizes his wife as an immensely positive person. “Little things don’t get her down. She was like that when she was sixteen years old — very upbeat. Her mom is very much the same way. There’s no such thing as a bad day.”
Sue Stone has been a close friend of Anna’s since they worked on the Peace at South holiday show six years ago. “She has enthusiasm, but she’s not one of those people that are over the top with it,” Sue says. “She can also be quiet, calm and enjoy a silent moment. That’s one of the things I love about her — all her different dimensions.”
One of those dimensions is a playful sense of humor. When friends call, she’s been known to answer the phone as someone else. “She’s amazing with accents and characters,” Sue says. “She’ll start making up words in another language, and it’ll sound totally authentic.”
Bruce volunteers that Anna does have a forgetful streak, but his fault-finding ends there. “I always tell people,” he says, “anybody could be married to her for twenty-eight years.”
Although life in New Canaan, a comfortable distance from the epicenter of professional insecurity in New York, suits Anna just fine these days, she admits to sometimes feeling on the outside looking in.
“There are many times since I’ve been in New Canaan when I feel so completely removed [from the business] and wonder if I can even call myself an actor. I’m doing so much that’s outside the business, and my life is not about acting. Recently, though, it has been fun to go back to it and find out that instrument you worked so hard on, you can wake it up.”
She delights in the work. Just don’t expect her to actively pursue anything outside her comfort zone. “I do stay sort of low, because if I ask I might get something, and then I have to juggle.”
Considering her unease with having too many balls in the air at once, it’s unlikely she’ll be adding that to her skill set. Not that she feels a need to.
“I’ve got to have my family happy,” she says. “And then I’m pretty satisfied.”