“For the character, you have to be careful where you pick from,” she says. She learned, over time, to let some of that pressure go-to not carry her characters’ pain, but rather let them in organically. That’s misery.” When she got her first series-regular role in 1997’s short-lived Nothing Sacred, and after she gave birth to the second of her three children, Emily, Dowd was living in Los Angeles and lost “a ton” of weight: “I was thin as a rail, and I couldn’t get a role to save my life.” If it takes suffering, then you bet I will, and I’m going to study and study and I’m going to know those lines.’ It was all push.

“I approached the same way: ‘Know this character, read the text, then I will know her. “You didn’t go home on vacation you stayed and studied and studied,” she says of her pre-med life. Originally on the pre-med track, she left it as a young student for what she really loved, and went into acting with the studious commitment of a doctor.

For a woman nearing four decades in the business, Dowd only recently realized the kind of actor she wanted to be.

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