Missed beginnings. Soon, fortune smiled on her. At 15, Anne participated in a high school play entitled "The Skin of Our Teeth". She was approached by a talent scout from the daytime drama "As The World Turns". She turned down the job offer on the soap opera because her family would have been forced to relocate from Chicago to New York.

"My father and brother had just died. My mother was starting a new business.Things were complicated, and I didn't want to leave. I started regretting it during my senior year. I guess I thought turning down ATWT was like - 'Ok forget it. It's never going to happen again.' "

First part. But Anne was wrong. The day after she graduated from high school , she flew away to New York for a new audition. She was finally retained to play the twins Marley and Vicky in the soap " Another World "

"The day I arrived, the producer said, 'Oh, by the way, you're playing twins, and one of them is a real sexpot. In your first scene you'll be naked in a bathtub-- "

The beginning of her career. .She played twins Marley McKinnon and Vicki Hudson Frame ( one good, one evil ) for four years, winning a daytime Emmy along the way in 1991. Anne then hesitates over the orientation to give to her career:

"--I didn't want to make a career of being a soap actress and was too afraid to commit to being a "real" actress without a job in place"

First film. She developed a passion for architecture and decided to apply for Parson School of Design. Finally she decided to accept a proposal that was made to her: Starring opposite Jessica Lange in a TV movie of the Willa Cather novel " O pioneers ". Then, she played small parts in sevral films for TV, until she met Steve Martin, her co-star in " A Simple Twist of Fate ". After 2 years together, Anne broke up. Steve, who was much older than her, had a hard time recovering from this breakup. The comedian would later call this relationship a "torturous love affair." In the media storm raised after the breakup, Steve's friends took to calling Anne the "Heartbreak Kid".

"The reality is that our relationship was not going to move forward crushed us both. I didn't want to be Mrs Steve Martin. He hadn't asked, but where else was it going to go? He was a man now in his fifties; I was a girl about midle of my twenties"