Amy Adams - Biography

Biography:

What a strange ride it's been for Amy Adams. Formerly a dinner theatre dancer in the mid-West, she's unusual in that Hollywood came to her, when the movie Drop Dead Gorgeous began casting close to her place of work. Scoring a prime role, she then took off for Los Angeles where she became the go-to bitch, playing a succession of snappy, snitty, manipulative horrors. Then, just as her career appeared to be languishing, she found herself Oscar-nominated for her performance as the crazily upbeat and decent Ashley in Junebug. Leading quickly to Enchanted, this would set her on the road to impressive success in dark period dramas, wacky comedies and mainstream blockbusters. In her own roundabout way, she had proven herself to be one of freshest and most intelligent character actresses of her generation.

She was born Amy Lou Adams on the 20th of August, 1974, at the US military base in Aviano, at the foot of the Dolomites in northern Italy, one of several bases set up after WW2 in fear of Russian invasion from the east. Her father was Richard K Adams, an army warrant officer attached to the hospital there. A red-haired Mormon and amateur actor who loved to play guitar and sing, he'd married Kathryn Hicken, a fellow Mormon he'd met at Brigham Young University in the late 1960s (her Class Valedictorian of 1971 had been Mitt Romney, later a candidate for President). Her family lived in Ogden, home of the Osmonds, close to Utah's Great Salt Lake, where antecedents such as J Hugh Hicken and Elijah Moulton had been prime movers in the Church Of Jesus Christ Of Latter Day Saints. Together Richard and Kathryn would quickly produce seven children - four boys and three girls, including Danny, Eddie and Juli - Amy being the fourth born.

Having moved from Aviano to the Caserma Ederle base at Vicenza, and then returned to the US for a brief stop at Fort Belvoir, a military installation in Fairfax County, Virginia, the Adams family would settle in Castle Rock, a town of some 35,000 around 35 miles south of Denver, Colorado (curiously there's another Castle Rock very close to Kathryn's hometowen of Ogden in Utah). Castle Rock had made its name through the mining of rhyolite stone and was a purposefully ordinary mid-western place. It was a bit of a shock for Amy, by then a fully-fledged army brat of about 8.

Amy would later describe her life with six energetic siblings as being like Lord of the Flies. Everyone was fighting for attention and there was never enough to go around. As a family they'd put on homegrown theatrical productions based on Richard's scripts, Amy being ever-ready to entertain all comers with her version of Tomorrow from the musical Annie.

Once, when her dad was off on military assignment, mum would write a skit based on a Pizza Hut jingle and the kids would perform. Amy would finish it in grand style with a front walkover and the splits as the curtain closed. Unfortunately, she lost a shoe in the effort and the audience giggled. Even more unfortunately, instead of helping his sister, one of her brothers held her down so the crowd could enjoy a good old laugh at her expense. With the Church there'd also be Sunday school and arts and crafts.

The family would also regularly visit restaurants, pizza joints and officers' clubs, the kids sipping milkshakes or Shirley Temples while their father performed covers of songs from the Fifties and Sixties, many of them doo-wop numbers. Part of his act saw him strum away on guitar while playing keyboards with his feet - feet encased in sparkly socks. It was a Jerry Lewis meets Jerry Lee Lewis slapstick thing. Amy thought he was amazingly cool. Grandma Colleen Hicken, born in Providence, Utah, but living back in Ogden would later note that, when visiting, her daughter and her brood always showed up in an old banger of a car. The kids, though, all with blonde hair and big blue eyes (Amy was so pale her sisters called her Fish Belly Blue), were mercifully easy to please. All she'd have to do to ensure peace and quiet, she said, was sit them down in front of the TV with a big sack of food.

Richard and Kathryn would split when Amy was 11, the divorce ending their involvement with the Mormon church and thus the kids' strict religious upbringing. The children would live with Richard but regularly see Kathryn, who was working at a gym and involved in amateur bodybuilding. All the kids would hang around Kathryn's gym after school - there were no babysitters, they just hung around in the back room - and go with her when she entered competitions. At Douglas County High School, home of the Huskies on Front Street, Castle Rock, Amy would serve in the school choir but would not really fit in to student life. Her parents would push her towards sport in the hope that she might win a college scholarship and she'd try hard in athletics and gymnastics, but her lack of a competitive nature would blunt her enjoyment of this. She preferred her out-of-school training with the David Taylor Dance Theatre, based at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Centre in the southern outskirts of Denver. Colorado's only original contemporary ballet company, the DTDT was a provocative 12-member troupe concerned with the metaphysical and ritualistic aspects of dance.

Lessons at the DTDT were a far cry from the teaching at high school, and the course and travel took up much of Adams' time outside school. Also working in regional theatre she moved ever further away from her classmates, making her school years all the more painful.

She'd later recall how she wasn't much good at sports, wasn't particularly popular and battled to keep a C Average so she could continue her studies with the David Taylor Dance Theatre. She'd hang out at the Village Inn, drink coffee and smoke and try to be cool. She loved Dirty Dancing and pop culture, she had the perfect high school boyfriend with long blonde hair and a Camaro but she didn't really fit in with the cheerleaders, and the theatre and dance groups thought she was snobby because she worked in "real" theatre and dance. Consequently the other students were mostly indifferent to her. This was a price she had to pay in order to fulfil her dream of becoming a ballerina, but it was hurtful nonetheless. Her art and sculpture teacher, Larry Alexander, would later describe her as having "the quiet intensity of a perfectionist", but she was also very perky. Earlier she had teased her younger sister for being an egg-head (she'd later become a professor of communications) then gradually come to realise that she herself was becoming overshadowed by her sister's academic achievements. It was then that she'd decided that singing, dancing and massive cheerfulness were means of grabbing and holding people's attention. They were also, as it turned out, ways of stirring up resentment. As an aside, Larry Alexander was an interesting character himself. In 1996, four years after Adams' graduation, he and his advanced sculpture class would create Loopers, a giant sculpture of an upended cereal bowl. They'd donate it to Castle Rock and it would be installed where it could be seen from both Douglas County High and the Interstate, the cereal spilling down the hillside. There'd later be a minor furore when someone stole the giant spoon, though the cops would rapidly get their man.

After graduating in 1992, Amy would move to Georgia to stay with her mother at Virginia Highlands, a culturally rich and very desirable area of Atlanta between Druid Hills and Piedmont Park. Here she would work at The Gap outlet in Lenox Square Mall. Though applying to work in the stockroom she'd impress the management with her peppiness and be employed as a greeter, at one point even daring to aim her patter at a visiting Whitney Houston. Adams would also, infamously, work for three months in an Atlanta branch of Hooters, a big burger-joint specialising in chicken wings where nubile young waitresses were clad in white tank tops and short orange shorts. Originally these shirts were pulled tight and knotted at the back to accentuate the young ladies' breasts and, even without the knotted shirts, the breasts remained a prominent feature and selling-point of the restaurant chain. Later in her career, Adams would be mercilessly interrogated about this period, many interviewers seeming to regard working at Hooters as being a form of prostitution, a degraded affront to the sisters and a shiny jackboot in the face of women everywhere.

Adams would claim she was so naive at this point that she failed at first to notice Hooters' sexual appeal. Her sister worked there and got her a job, she said, so she could earn enough to buy her own car. At $7 an hour it took her three months to raise the necessary $900, then she was gone.

Adams had taken a long, hard look at her ambitions and recognised that she'd never make the grade as a ballerina. Instead she decided to move into musical theatre, a medium that would also be better suited to her deliberately chipper personality. With typical resourcefulness, she'd proceed to find work in several of Colorado's theatres, scooting around in a rusty car known to her family as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She'd score a fortunate professional entry when an actor was injured at Boulder's 284-seat Dinner Theatre (Boulder being some 50 miles to the north-west of Denver) and Adams was rushed into service in a production of A Chorus Line. With no chance to spend any time with the cast, she'd learn all the songs and dances from watching videos and still would fit in seamlessly, immediately convincing her mother that she had a future in this business.

At age 20 Adams would spend some time working at the Heritage Square Music Hall in Golden, just west of Denver. This was run by the renowned TJ Mullin and specialised in blue collar comedy, most shows involving a parody of some classic followed by a musical revue. Photos of Adams can still be found where she's gayly clad in pirate outfit and moustache, and she'd also play the Trip Lady in the 1995 production of Frankenstein, as her name suggests having to trip up in front of the monster. The same year would see her in an adaptation of Seven Brides For Seven Brothers at Denver's own Country Dinner Playhouse. Also at this venue, the second largest theatre in Colorado, known affectionately as The Barn and seating some 470, would come a run in Cole Porter's glitzy, sassy Depression-era musical Anything Goes, featuring Lise Simms as the daring, seductive Reno Sweeney, which ran from 1994 into 1995. Dinner theatres were very popular in the mid-West, audiences liking to make a night of it by being served a meal then sitting back in the same seats to watch a show, often in the round. Performers would usually wait tables before getting up onstage and shows would often run for six months, sometimes a year or longer. In 2004 there were ten dinner theatres in Colorado, generating $10 million and drawing 350,000 customers, about 22% of the state's entire theatre attendance.

It was in Anything Goes that Adams would be spotted by Michael Brindisi, artistic director of the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, the biggest dinner theatre in America. Despite the fact that he was there searching for a male lead, Brindisi would claim that Adams, though just a chorus girl, "jumped right off the stage. She was magnetic".

Casting for a new production of Crazy For You he signed her up and so, having fulfilled her other theatrical commitments, she took off for Minnesota and the Twin Cities, Chanhassen being just to the south-west, 30 minutes from downtown Minneapolis, in an area dotted with lakes and country clubs. The Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, situated on West 78th Street, possessed three separate theatres (the main one seating 541) and many lounges and restaurants, one bar having in 1990 been named Brindisi's Pub after the theatre's well-respected director. Adams would join the cast of Crazy For You as a replacement after it had begun its run on February 2nd, 1996. Though she was not required to double as a waitress here, it was hard work, eight shows a week in the round. It was also intimidating as all the dancers and singers were at a far higher level than she'd been used to. Nevertheless Adams, with her strong work ethic, would love it, quickly getting used to this new life and often to be found shopping at the Opitz clothes shop in St Louis Park, Minneapolis.

. With Adams playing the minor role of the squeaky Patsy, Crazy For You would run for an amazing 53 consecutive weeks. Her next production, opening in January of 1997 would be Rodgers and Hammerstein's State Fair, based on the 1945 movie version with its extra songs. Adams would here play a tapdancing pig. Again the show would be a huge success, also running for 53 weeks and selling 165,000 tickets. January 1998 would bring Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon, where two American tourists stumble upon a Scottish village that appears for one day every hundred years. By now Adams had risen to main cast status and played the dainty and sweet Jean MacLaren. She's about to marry her lover Charlie Dalrymple, much to the chagrin of Harry Beaton, played by Tony Vierling, who, in his insane jealousy and disappointment threatens the whole village. In her beautiful pale blue dress Adams would dance brilliantly and would be missed when a pulled muscle caused her to step down.

This injury would be exceptionally fortuitous as it allowed Adams to audition for a movie about to be filmed in Minnesota. This was Drop Dead Gorgeous, starring Kirstie Alley, Ellen Barkin and Alison Janney, as well as youngsters Kirsten Dunst, Denise Richards and Brittany Murphy. Adams would win a role, a reasonably prominent one and, encouraged by Alley, would reconsider her plans to take off for the stages of New York (she'd been saving up) and begin to consider a Hollywood career. Why couldn't she pull it off, she reasoned, when Keri Russell, another young Colorado girl was just then enjoying a hit with the TV series Felicity? Returning to the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, Adams would inform Michael Brindisi of her intention to leave. In turn he would ask her to see the company through the opening months of their next production, Good News, due to open on November 6th, 1998.

This she did, performing, amongst other numbers, The Varsity Drag, and leaving for Los Angeles early in 1999, accompanied by her brother Eddie. She was 24.

As said, Adams had been saving her money for an assault on Broadway. She'd never really considered Hollywood, that was for special people, not like her. But since Hollywood had come to her in the shape of Drop Dead Gorgeous she'd realised that these actresses were just normal types, working hard to stay ahead of the game. She'd raised her level when she arrived at Chanhassen, she could do so again.

Drop Dead Gorgeous would be an excellent calling-card, not a big money-spinner but a movie funny and intelligent enough to make waves in the right circles. It was set in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of America's oldest beauty pageant, sponsored by a cosmetics firm for 17-year-olds. In documentary style we're introduced to the participants in a heat to be held in small town Mount Rose in Minnesota. Kirstie Alley would play a former winner desperate to see her daughter Denise Richards follow in her footsteps. Her main rivals would be Kirsten Dunst, who lives in a trailer with rough mum Ellen Barkin, a thoroughly insane Brittany Murphy and Adams, a wound-up cheerleader sort, all teeth, tics and giant grins. She's in the competition because her neanderthal jock boyfriend thinks she'll win and they do worship each other, falling into a sexual embrace whenever they can, no matter how publicly. In her interview with the judges, having said she'd like football star Brett Favre to be president, she's asked if she's nervous. Yes, she says, it's been two months and she hasn't told her boyfriend yet. Alley, insultingly but quite reasonably, refers to her as Miss Penthouse '98. Onstage and off, Adams would be involved in several hilarious moments, starting off with a model of the Washington Monument on her head, then dancing first with stepladders and then beside her boyfriend and his buddy while they wrestle. When sabotage denies Dunst a costume Adams is quick to explain "They'll never let you perform naked. I asked". At the prize-giving she shakes and weeps with excitement. She's very impressive and all the more so for being so new to the process.

Having made it to LA, Adams would immediately seek representation and, falling on her feet once again, would score the very best. An actress friend of one of Adams' cousins would pull a favour and engineer Adams a meeting with her own agent, one Stacy Boniello. Boniello would call New Line who'd worked with Adams on Drop Dead Gorgeous and receive a positive response. Boniello then decided to take Adams on for pilot season, just to see how it went, and it immediately went well. Fox were looking to spin a series off from their recent screen hit Cruel Intentions, itself an update of Dangerous Liaisons.

To be called Manchester Prep, it was to work as an elongated prequel to the movie, explaining how the Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe characters met and following their depraved early antics as they trick, cheat and seduce their way through school. The perky Adams might seem an unlikely choice as the Gellar character, Kathryn Merteuil, but she summoned her inner bitch and won the part. Shooting would begin but there'd be conflict between Fox and Columbia and production would soon be halted, must to Adams' pleasure as she'd found nothing in the Merteuil character she could hold onto. Still, she'd been impressive enough in the role to influence casting agents who were now beating down her door whenever they needed a snob, a slut, an utter cow or even all three at once. It remains hard to believe that this is how the future star of Enchanted started out.

Manchester Prep would never be screened. At least not as the 22-episode series it was intended to be. Instead it would finally creep out in 2000, the few episodes that had been filmed having been hacked up and re-edited (along with some reshoots) into Cruel Intentions 2. Here Robin Dunne would play the bad lad, expelled from school and sent to live in New York with his fabulously wealthy father, plus his new wife Mimi Rogers and her daughter Adams. At first Dunne has the upper hand over Adams, being more accomplished academically and musically, but she works hard at being top dog. At school she's big on extra-curriculars and is president of a shadowy group dedicated to kicking out the poor and the geeky. Now she concentrates on breaking Dunne. Strict, pushy, unforgiving, ill-tempered, cruel to the staff and generally disagreeable, she's more pouty and less seductive than Gellar but she does revel well in her unpleasantness. She's particularly funny when she makes a young innocent bounce about on horseback until she orgasms and falls off. On several occasions, most notably the occasion with the naked twins in the shower, Cruel Intentions 2 would descend into soft pornography.

Before Cruel Intentions 2 reared its particularly ugly head, Adams would be very busy indeed. Already she'd been interviewed by Interview magazine and appeared in their Hot Pop 30 list. Stacy Boniello, who also represented Vin Diesel and Kevin Bacon, was hot, so hot that in 2000 she'd be invited to join Jeff Kwatinetz's agency The Firm, dealing in huge music stars like Jennifer Lopez and The Backstreet Boys. Come 2002 they'd acquire Michael Ovitz's Artist Management Group and begin to deal with the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Cameron Diaz and Martin Scorsese. None of this would do Adams any harm at all.

With Boniello behind her, 2000 would see Adams filming near constantly. One of the first roles she'd be offered was as a Pink Ranger in the kids' TV show Power Rangers.

Everyone told her to take it, it was good work, a probable hit, but she turned it down, wanting to act seriously. It would certainly have been more successful than the intended series The Peter Principle, as the title suggests a workplace comedy. Though starring Paul F Tompkins, an Emmy award winner for his writing on Mr Show, the pilot would be shot but never aired, meaning that Adams' first release since her arrival in Los Angeles would be Psycho Beach Party, a satire of 1960s beach party movies based on Charles Busch's drag musical, a hit off-Broadway in the 1980s. Originally most of the leads, male and female, were played by men. Now Lauren Ambrose took the lead as Chicklet, a possibly homicidal Gidget type with a split personality that sees her change into a sexy dominatrix and also a sassy black girl. She's attracted to surfer dude Starcat, played by Nicholas Brendon, but he's already taken by Adams' Marvel Ann, a boy-crazy teen vixen with a serious superiority complex. To attract the boys she poses wildly by the surf, even resorting to untying her bikini top. When a group asks if they should unpack their bongos she says "I intend to unpack mine". Later she's involved in a dance-off on the beach, coming on like a frenetic version of Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction then flouncing off after her defeat.

Adams would play yet another teen harridan in her next appearance, in an episode of Season 2 of the hugely popular That '70s Show which made stars of Ashton Kutcher and Wilmer Valderrama. Here Kutcher would wreck a dinner party by trying to turn it into a groovy rave-up. Meanwhile Danny Masterson has been secretly seeing Adams, the most popular girl in school who at the party humiliates him in front of her friends. Once they're gone, though, she comes on to him again, provoking the classic line "You know, for a rich girl you're kinda skanky".

Adams' next TV outing would be in Charmed, where four sister witches would battle weekly against the forces of darkness. In this episode Shannon Doherty would be hired by 415 magazine to photograph Adams, styled as the unluckiest girl ever. In fact Adams is a saintly type who's being driven to suicide by an invisible demon, the demon's job being to stop the good guys getting to heaven. Doherty saves Adams, but then faces the demon's revenge and needs saving herself.

Adams would now be seen at Short Film festivals across the nation when The Chromium Hook did the rounds. Made earlier in Minnesota, this was a mockumentary drama investigating goings-on in the small town of Nimrod where Adams and Kyle Ingleman would play a young couple who've had a backseat romp interrupted by a killer with a hook for a hand. Through a series of interviews with the townsfolk this urban legend grows while the corruption, rebellion and insanity within the town is revealed.

Billed as Amy Lou Adams, Adams would reveal herself to be on the Nimrod High debating team and add that she's never missed an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Chromium Hook would be named Best Minnesota Short of 2000.

Adams would continue her run of TV work with an appearance in Zoe, Duncan, Jack & Jane, a teen sitcom involving the four main characters of the title. Selma Blair, who'd earlier appeared in the original Cruel Intentions, would star as Zoe, Zoe actually becoming the title of the show when it moved into Season 2 and the kids were now college students (this was when Adams would show up). Following this would come an episode of Providence where successful LA plastic surgeon Melina Kanakaredes would return to her hometown in Rhode Island, work at a free clinic and try to deal with her dysfunctional family. In an odd twist on her past real life, Adams would play a dancer who needs the doctor to declare her fit for a performance by the Providence Ballet. Kanakaredes though believes Adams' ankle injury may be serious and encourages her to give up dancing altogether.

Immediately before the straight-to-DVD release of Cruel Intentions 2, Adams would appear alongside the star of Cruel Intentions I when she popped up in the 84th episode of Sarah Michelle Gellar's Buffy The Vampire Slayer, also featuring her Psycho Beach Party co-star Nicholas Brendon. Here Buffy's mate Tara is about to turn twenty and her family arrives to take her away, fearing she's about to turn into a demon as her mother did at that age. Adams would play Tara's smug, malicious cousin Beth who accuses Tara of being selfish in not coming home to look after her father and brother. She then threatens to grass when she realises Tara has cast a spell so her friends can no longer see demons. Of course, Adams would be disappointed as Tara's friends prove to be nicer to her than her family and would never force her to live in some sexist nightmare of kitchen-bound drudgery.

Despite all the roles pushed her way by Stacy Boniello, Adams would not really enjoy her first year in Los Angeles. She was lonely, missed her family (despite the presence of Eddie) and in particular missed the closeness of her extended theatrical family in Chanhassen. Beyond this, because she'd not attended college she felt as if she wasn't adequately socialised. Still a naive mid-Western girl at heart, she couldn't believe that men might want to cop off with her and not want to see her again. She just didn't feel sophisticated enough, either at work or at play.

One way she hoped to change this was by attending acting classes at the Warner Loughlin Studios. Loughlin had just served as acting coach on the hit movie Traffic and was currently involved in both The Good Girl and Road To Perdition. Clearly she was in demand and her technique was proving a hit.

This she labelled Emotion With Detail, students undergoing huge amounts of research in order to live their characters from childhood onwards, building an emotional history and a deep visceral connection. No surprise that she had worked with Lee Strasberg for years, then been inspired by Michael Kahn. Beyond this, Loughlin was available for coaching at all times, by phone or video if needs be. She cost $150 an hour, a price thought well worth paying by the likes of Zooey Deschanel, Kate Bosworth, Ryan Reynolds and James Van Der Beek.

Also studying under Loughlin would be Darren Le Gallo, from San Antonio, Texas. He was the same age as Adams, having graduated from Tom Clark High School in 1992 and was toying with an acting career, though his real interest would prove to be in surrealism, painting, drawing and video art. Eventually he would paint live in nightclubs while bands played along, and release a 2008 book collecting his pieces since 1990. Le Gallo would appear in an episode of Six Feet Under and a McDonalds ad where he's sat scoffing a burger while a hot chick ogles his muffin. More importantly he'd also appear in the 2002 short film Pennies, written by Eddie Adams (at this time Eddie would also appear as a young Michael York in Austin Powers In Goldmember) and directed by Warner Loughlin. Here Amy would play a waitress and single mum who, it appears, must earn enough in two hours to pay a ransom on her endangered child. Desperately attempting to earn as many tips as possible she encounters stoned nerds, macho assholes, lesbian ladies and a mysterious man who can stop time. She's briefly saved when a chap drops a wallet but gives in to her innate decency when he asks if she's seen it, then she's plunged into despair when a robber cleans her out. Le Gallo would play one of the nicer assholes. It wasn't a big part for him but he did soon begin to date Adams.

She was winning parts, she'd found love, but it hadn't all been going Adams' way. Her second year in Los Angeles had seen her dropped from two shows. The first set-back she expected as she knew she was too young for the part. On the second occasion, though, she was jetissoned just 20 minutes after a table read where she'd been told the producers would see her the next day. This betrayal hurt her, but she was soothed by her lawyer who called to tell her not to worry. These things happen, she'd done well in her first year and should just keep going. The lawyer was Jason Sloane, soon to marry Embeth Davidtz, an actress who'd later share one of Adams' greatest triumphs.

Adams' only appearance of 2001 would be in Season One of Smallville, concerning the adventures of the young Clark Kent. Here she'd play an unhappy teen with a weight problem. In order to drop a few pounds she makes a smoothie from veg growing around the family home but, unfortunately, it's tainted with kryptonite from a meteor. Losing stones in record time, she can only survive by eating her classmates. With Adams in a fat suit and utterly rapacious, it was an eye-catching role that caught no one's eye, a fate she would suffer for some time yet.

2002 would bring a rush of big screen releases. First would come The Slaughter Rule, set in a rural Montana town and starring Ryan Gosling. Here Gosling would be a High School senior who loses the two most important things in his life - his father and his place on the football team. Then he meets David Morse, a grizzled loner who arranges amateur 6-a-side football games. In Morse, Gosling finds a father and a mentor, and also trouble as many believe Morse to be gay. It was a rites-of-passage piece with Gosling forced to overcome the pains and prejudices of small town life. One temptation would be Adams, a cheerleader for the Bisons, who publicly dates one player but still flirts with Gosling and gets off with his best friend in the back of a car. It was a small role for Adams as she'd appear mostly in the background. Indeed, she'd make a better showing in the Deleted Scenes section of the DVD.

Next up would come another tiny role, this time in the controversial black teen comedy Pumpkin. Here Christina Ricci would be a member of a southern California sorority house hoping to be named best of the year. To win this prize they agree to coach "special people" - handicapped and retarded athletes. Ricci would get involved with the wheelchair-bound discus-thrower of the title, their relationshop going down badly with Ricci's jock boyfriend and Pumpkin's controlling mother, Brenda Blethyn. Adams would be seen mostly amidst a group of friends, though she would deliver one line in French. Following this would come Serving Sara where Matthew Perry would play a former lawyer now serving papers for Cedric The Entertainer. While landing divorce papers on Elizabeth Hurley on behalf of wealthy Texan rancher Bruce Campbell he learns that Hurley will now receive nothing from her husband, thus a deal is struck whereby, for a million bucks, Perry will serve papers on Campbell instead. Adams would appear as Campbell's new mistress, a cheerleader type with wide eyes, tight clothes, plastic grin and exaggerated politeness. Pretending to sympathise with the heroes' predicament she grabs Perry's attention in a bar with a deft wiggle of her bosom then agrees to help them, again for a million bucks. It's in fact a stitch-up as Adams is as competitive and ruthless as she appears to be cute. She was certainly one of the more entertaining aspects of what was a poor show.

Adams' only TV appearance of 2002 would come in The West Wing, the opening episode of Season Four where president Martin Sheen is out on the road in the midst of his re-election campaign. Adams would play a smart girl of farming stock with a Masters degree and a second job as a claims adjustor. She meets White House insiders Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff to discuss family farming in America then ends up driving staff to the next town when Sheen takes off for Indiana without them.

Adams' next project would be her first blockbuster, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can. Here Leonardo DiCaprio would play real-life Frank Abagnale Jr, a young con man in the 1960s who managed to bluff his way into becoming a pilot, a doctor and a prosecutor, all the while being tailed by the FBI. After being caught by agent Tom Hanks he flees to Georgia where he fakes diplomas to score a job at a hospital where he falls for young, insecure nurse Adams. She's a picture of pig-tailed naivety, but she adores him. In one lovely scene she enters his office during a rainstorm, gives him a ludicrous, ditzy grin to reveal she's no longer wearing braces then, when he kisses her, leaps upon him with true abandon. She was tremendously cute and funny and continued her good work when introducing DiCaprio to her parents, her state prosecutor father being her recent co-star Martin Sheen.

Catch Me If You Can was a big hit in America and Adams was really good in it. It ought to have led to better, bigger roles. It ought to have led to immediate success. Even Steven Spielberg stated that Adams was now set for stardom. But it didn't happen. Nothing happened. For a whole year Adams was offered no worthwhile cinema projects at all. Her only filmic appearance would be in the straight-to-DVD The Last Run where Fred Savage, cheated on by his girlfriend, would be advised to get over it by sleeping with as many women as possible by his womanising best friend, Adams playing the fiancee of said friend, trying to organise a wedding that he doesn't really care about. It was sorry stuff, a crude attempt to distance Savage from the clean-cut past of The Wonder Years. Beyond this there would be the ensemble comedy-drama Standing Still. This would see Adams and Adam Garcia as a young couple about to be married and inviting their best friends over for a stag/hen do. The boys will jet off to Vegas while the girls stay home and rock out with pizzas and strippergrams. Amidst the fun there's much confusion as the different characters strike against each other. There's misunderstood slapper Mena Suvari, sleazy agent Colin Hanks, film star James Van Der Beek and drunken director Roger Avary, plus lesbian musician Lauren German, who had an affair with Adams at college and immediately tries to rekindle it, Adams obviously enjoying her sexual advances (her second lesbian clinch after Cruel Intentions 2). Though she has this wild background, Adams is now hiding it.

More grown up than the others, she tries to get her fiance to explain his pain and even runs the risk of inviting his estranged father. Her reaction to the strippergram could only be that of a person who expected nothing of the kind. Sadly, though filmed in November, 2003, Standing Still would not see the light of day till the Cinevegas Festival in 2005 and not be released till April, 2006, when it would stretch to only 15 screens in America. It deserved a better fate. Aside from this, Adams would lend her voice to three episodes of the series King Of The Hill, featuring Brittany Murphy, co-star in her very first movie, Drop Dead Gorgeous.

Catch Me If You Can had been a big confidence boost for Adams. Working alongside Spielberg, DiCaprio and Sheen she'd realised that she could act at the highest level. But she couldn't wait around for years hoping that great roles would fall into her lap, thus she returned to TV in CBS's new series Dr Vegas. Here Rob Lowe, rehabilitated by The West Wing, would play a maverick doctor in an old school casino hotel, tending to guests and employees and battling the temptations of Sin City as well as casino manager Joe Pantoliano. Adams would have a prime role as Alice Doherty, Lowe's nurse practitioner, who supplies equipment and calls out vital signs for him, and occasionally challenges him. She also fancies the pants off him and seduces him by the third episode, a liaison that leaves her heartbroken. Later she'll get drunk with a bad boy, forge Lowe's signature on a prescription and attract the interest of the police. As said, it was a good role, though her character, as are most TV nurses, would be almost entirely subservient to the doctor. However, when the producers attempted to change the terms of Adams' contract she refused to compromise and was let go, essentially fired. The show would survive no longer than she did. Having first aired in September, 2004, it would be taken off the air in October after just 5 episodes.

So now, at the age of 29, living in a tiny flat with dingy carpets on Croft Avenue in West Hollywood, it wasn't looking good for Adams. She really wasn't getting the kind of work she desired. She even modelled for the cover of a book - Going Hollywood: How To Get Started, Keep Going And Not Turn Into A Sleaze. Her next picture would be the half-arsed rom-com The Wedding Date where Debra Messing would hire escort Dermot Mulroney to pretend to be her boyfriend at the wedding of her sister Adams as Messing's ex is best man. Where Messing is messy, confused and insecure, the self-possessed Adams seems to take it all in her stride, at least till she's forced to admit to a past love-crime and is driven by guilt to fess up to English fiance Jack Davenport.

The Wedding Date was a minor hit but hardly a career breakthrough for Adams. Her next picture, too, held out little hope of improving her lot. This was Junebug, a film she'd scored in the most flukey circumstances. Adams had been shooting Dr Vegas in Las Vegas but was told by the producers that she wouldn't be needed for a few days. Annoyed by their attitude she returned to LA and auditioned for Junebug that weekend. Soon fired from Dr Vegas she suddenly had the summer to herself and so took on Junebug. It was a tiny independent, but at least it got her away from those pigs in the big studios.

Junebug was directed by Phil Morrison and set in his home town of Winston-Salem in North Carolina. Adams would turn up a week early to spend time with him and get a feel for the area and the character. To Morrison's delight she'd commit to Ashley Johnsten as written and attempt to make this unbelievable girl real. She'd succeed beyond any of their wildest dreams. In the movie Alessandro Nivola would play a Carolina boy working in big city Chicago where he meets and marries cosmopolitan art dealer and agent Embeth Davidtz. Keen to secure the signature of a reclusive artist based near Nivola's hometown, she engineers a visit home to his family. Here we meet his protective mum and taciturn dad, his jealous, quietly raging brother and the brother's heavily pregnant wife, Adams. Adams is the star of this show, a determinedly decent girl with a strong belief in God and his goodness. She's also ecstatically pleased to see Nivola and especially Davidtz. Joyfully curious, child-like in her need to become friends, she's voracious in devouring Davidtz's every word, having clearly been starved of any intellectual or emotional feedback in her time with this strange, deeply religious family. The film would follow the characters through their various failures, gradually revealing the extent to which they misunderstand each other and hide their true natures. The relentlessly charming Adams would have her moment at the end, in hospital, shedding her cheery mask as she questions herself, God and the doctors.

Having finished Junebug, Adams would seriously consider giving up on movies and re-embracing her earlier ambition of making it on Broadway. Indeed, she was all set to fly to New York for a callback for a musical there. But then came Sundance, 2005, where Junebug would receive a rapturous welcome, becoming a massive critical hit in the States. Adams would be the major recipient of praise. Ashley's sayings would be picked out, particularly one line she delivers to her moody husband; "God loves you just the way you are, but too much to let you stay that way", which Adams and Morrison had pinched from a preacher at the Green Street Methodist Church in Winston-Salem. Adams would win a Special Jury Prize at Sundance, followed by further wins in Washington DC, Vancouver, San Francisco, Florida and Ohio.

She'd win an Independent Spirit Award and eventually be nominated for an Oscar. Suddenly things had changed. And not just her hair colour. Adams liked Ashley's russet locks, preferring to be seen from now on as a quirky spitfire rather than a ditzy blonde. Beyond this, Junebug was the first time that she felt secure in herself as an actress and as a woman.

While she was actually at Sundance, Adams was approached to appear in Winter Of Frozen Dreams, the story of Barbara Hoffman, a Wisconsin biochemistry student who moonlighted in a massage parlour and was accused of fatally poisoning two clients for money back in 1977. Adams said she liked the sound of it and could they send her a script. Twenty minutes later she'd won the Special Jury Prize, but still read for director Mike Graf and agreed to star in his film. Sadly, set to begin shooting in November of that year it was heavily delayed and Adams could no longer appear, the film eventually being released in 2009, starring Thora Birch. Later on in 2005 Adams would be deep into talks to star in Barry Munday with Luke Wilson, where Wilson would play a womaniser who wakes to find his genitals have been severed by an enraged father. Adams would pull out of this to appear in a far more interesting project - Disney's Enchanted.

Before this there'd be a few more ups and downs. The film Adams took on after Junebug would be Moonlight Serenade, a romance where Alec Newman would play a successful financier, a musician by night, who one night hears a beautiful voice float into his apartment. It turns out to be Adams, the cloakroom girl at the local jazz club. Newman must now persuade her to sing with him, their relationship becoming more than strictly musical. The movie would fail to convince any backers and would be released straight-to-DVD three years later, in 2009.

Once the Junebug buzz has started up, though, Adams was on her way. Her next appearance would be in three episodes of the hit TV series The Office, Adams turning up in the last episode of Season One then two more in Season Two. Her first episode, directed by Amy Heckerling of Fast Times At Ridgemont High fame, would see her arrive at the titular workplace hoping to sell handbags. Boss Steve Carell fancies her so he breaks his own rule and lets her set up shop in a conference room. Carell then attempts to impress Adams by humiliating all the other guys, but she eventually accepts a lift home from quiet man John Krasinski. In her second episode she'd now be Krasinski's girlfriend and show up to meet him for lunch when everyone's out in the car park during a fire alarm. Here she'd join in with the guys' games and be roundly mocked for choosing Legally Blonde for her Desert Island Movie. Then, in her final episode, she'd join the office's leadership training exercise on a boat.

Here she hits it off with Roy, boyfriend of Pam, the girl that Krasinski really loves, but Roy gets drunk and tries to set a wedding date with Pam, causing a crushed Krasinski to break up with Adams.

Come 2006 and the Oscars ceremony, Adams was truly bankable. Her next appearance would be alongside Will Ferrell in the surefire hit comedy Talledega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby. Here Ferrell, inspired by the winner-takes-all philosophy of his irresponsible drunken father, becomes a NASCAR champion, enjoying all the trappings of fame, a mansion and a Daisy Duke-like wife. Then he crashes and loses his nerve, his best friend John C Reilly taking his house, his wife and his place in the team. In recovery Ferrell would be aided by Adams, his plain and mousy assistant. Driving him back to fitness for the final confrontation with arch-rival Sacha Baron Cohen she gives him an extraordinary pep talk in a bar, rousing and increasingly hysterical and incomprehensible, ending with her crawling across the table and kissing him. Here and in a breast-poppin' competition with Ferrell's ex, she revealed herself to be a Playboy bunny in a librarian's outfit. She was crude, yes, but this was a Will Ferrell movie and at least she was skilfully crude. It was also a giant hit, her biggest since Catch Me If You Can.

After the release of Pennies, filmed back in 2002, Adams would help out another new comedy hero in Tenacious D in The Pick Of Destiny, where Jack Black and Kyle Gass played the titular hard rock duo. At one point, in a dream sequence, they would be performing Master Exploder onstage when the camera cuts to audience member Adams, pouting and miming the words "I love you, JB". It was just a fun-time cameo which would see her credited next to recent co-star John C Reilly as well as Ben Stiller. She'd also deliver a funny cameo in The Ex, otherwise known as Fast Track. Here Zach Braff would play a stubborn idealist who loses his job just as wife Amanda Peet is due to give birth. To make ends meet he must take a job in her father Charles Grodin's New Age ad agency in Ohio, suffering comic competition from Peet's vicious, manipulative, wheelchair-bound ex Jason Bateman. Adams would appear in three scenes as a girl from high school that Peet used to hate, who bursts back into her life and forces her to attend her baby classes. By way of introduction she holds her baby on top of Peet's and wiggles him around. It's weird, inappropriate and very funny, as are the scenes at Adams' classes where she accuses Peet's baby of never smiling because Peet won't join in with her laughter therapy. Peet snaps back, calling Adams an idiot and her baby something worse, leaving Adams a portrait of bug-eyed outrage.

Adams' first effort of 2007 would be Underdog, a live action movie based on the popular 1964 animation, with the animal stars being lip-synched. Basically, Jason Lee's Underdog is a poor hound who's bullied by strays and ignored by a pretty King Charles spaniel that takes his fancy - all until he's involved in a lab accident that gifts him special powers. Adams would voice the pampered spaniel, Polly Purebred.

If Junebug started an Adams buzz, her next picture, Enchanted, would seal her stardom. One of Disney's finer recent efforts, it would begin as a cartoon where a princess beloved of all the animals would be set to marry her prince, only to be banished to Earth by his evil witch of a mother, played by Susan Sarandon. Switching to live action, Adams is now the princess arriving in modern-day New York in full princess regalia. Here she meets single dad Patrick Dempsey and charms his daughters to the extent that he agrees to put her up, much to the annoyance of his girlfriend. Meanwhile prince James Marsden comes looking for her, aided by Sarandon's snitch Timothy Spall. The path of true love is not running smoothly, but nothing affects Adams' good-hearted cheeriness. It was seriously good fun and another big hit. It would also see Adams win a Golden Globe nomination.

Less of a hit but just as classy would be Charlie Wilson's War, a reunion with Tom Hanks. Here Hanks would play a hard-drinking, womanising Congressman, a career bon vivant who, due to his position on several relevant committees, is targeted by socialite activist Julia Roberts to help finance and provide weapons for Afghans fighting against Russian invaders. It's tricky as they must buy Russian weapons from Israel and transport them through Pakistan but, aided by rogue CIA agent Philip Seymour Hoffman, Hanks pulls it off. Adams would play Hanks' smart, efficient and thoroughly presentable personal secretary, keeping him on the straight-and-narrow and taking an immediate dislike to Roberts who she believes is using Hanks politically and sexually. She'd also accompany Hanks to Pakistan to meet General Zia and go on with him to the refugee camps of Peshawar, at the same time helping him fight charges of sleaze involving the use of cocaine and strippers. She loves him, and forgives the old rascal his many foibles.

Adams' first film of 2008 would be Sunshine Cleaning, co-starring Emily Blunt, who'd briefly appeared in Charlie Wilson's War as Hanks' rather too young girlfriend. Here Adams would play a single mum, engaged in a long affair with high school beau Steve Zahn, who's fathered her child but married another woman. Desperate for money, Adams sets up a business cleaning crime scenes along with her goofy, hard-living sister Blunt and the comedy changes to drama as the sisters must face up to the suicide of their mother and Adams must accept that she's no longer the Little Miss Popular she was at school.

The two leads were great together and Adams would also work well with Frances McDormand in Miss Pettigrew Lives for A Day. Here McDormand would play a governess in 1939 London, sacked and out on the streets. Hearing that actress-singer Adams is taking on a new social secretary, McDormand rushes round to Adams' luxurious apartment and steals the job. Now, in just 24 hours, McDormand must help Adams clean up the mess in her life, and it is quite a mess as she's being housed by nightclub impresario Mark Strong, she's sleeping with rich producer Tom Payne in order to score a role, but she loves lowly pianist Lee Pace. Adams would be scatty, bright and willing but unable to control her life. She's a panicked swirl of silk and chiffon, flirtatious and charming and willing to play the little girl lost in order to get her way. She must be careful as she's really from poor Philadelphia stock, thus in a way sharing McDormand's position. She'd also be capable of mighty sincerity, her revelatory rendition of If I Didn't Care with Pace on piano was really very moving. After filming wrapped, she and her boyfriend would spend three weeks touring Italy, Adams' first ever real vacation that wasn't a wedding or a public holiday. For the first time she'd revisit Vicenza and the area of her birth.

Adams would next step out on a limb when hosting Saturday Night Live, in her monologue singing What Is This Feeling from the musical Wicked while in a battle with Kristen Wiig. Perhaps more of a risk would be her next picture, Doubt, where she'd go head-to-head with Meryl Streep and her Charlie Wilson's War co-star Philip Seymour Hoffman, two of the greatest actors of their time. Based on the play by John Patrick Shanley, who'd also direct the film, Doubt would see Streep as the severe headmistress of a school in the Bronx in 1964. Suspicious of change and convinced of the lowering of standards, both in the church and outside, she asks her nuns to be vigilant and inform her of any wrongdoings. Adams would play young Sister James, a maths and history teacher, who notices that new, progressive priest Hoffman has had a private meeting with a troubled black student and tells Streep, setting the drama in motion. Hoffman then convinces Adams of his innocence but Adams cannot convince Streep as she remorselessly goes after her prey. This would be Adams finest performance to date. She'd be naive in her dealings with the students, trusting with Hoffman, and afraid of and easily led by Streep until, convinced of her superior's intolerance, she shrilly stands up against her. All three leads, plus Viola Davis would be Oscar nominated for their brilliant efforts. Adams would also be nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe and would learn to knit, being taught the art by Streep, who regularly used it in her preparation. She deserved her success as she'd fought for the role.

Hearing about it from Emily Blunt on the set of Sunshine Cleaning, she'd flown to New York, called John Patrick Shanley and told him she was there to meet him. Shanley had someone else in mind for Sister James but Adams was persistent and won through.

As well as Sunshine Cleaning, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day and Doubt, 2008 would bring an engagement. On the 24th of August, Adams and her boyfriend Darren Le Gallo would go to see Frances McDormand in Clifford Odets' The Country Girl at the Bernard B Jacobs Theatre, the play also starring Morgan Freeman and Peter Gallagher and being directed by Mike Nichols, who'd earlier helmed Charlie W ilson's War. On the way home, while riding through Central Park in a carriage, Le Gallo would ask for her hand and she'd give it. That year named as the 9th highest paid actress in Hollywood, and having been invited to sing Enchanted's Happy Working Song at the Oscars, she seemed to be made.

Adams would begin 2009 with a reunion with Ben Stiller in Night At The Museum: Battle Of The Smithsonian where Stiller would have to infiltrate the Smithsonian in order to rescue his old pals, Owen Wilson's cowboy and Steve Coogan's centurion. Along the way, with another set of historical characters coming to life, he'd be aided by Adams' Amelia Earhart, sweet, spunky and clad in leather jacket and jodhpurs. It was another massive hit but Roger Ebert would dismiss it as predictable fare, adding that only Adams transcended the tomfoolery. She'd then move on to Julie & Julia, Nora Ephron's light-hearted drama where Adams would play Julie Powell, a modern-day housewife working her way through the classic recipe book of Meryl Streep's Julia Child, Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, at the same time working on her life and marriage. The action would flit between two eras, Adams thus being denied a chance to work with Streep again.

Come 2010, Adams would appear in David O Russell's The Fighter, where Mark Wahlberg would play real-life boxer Irish Mickey Ward, struggling on his way to three amazing fights with Arturo Gatti and a welterweight title belt. Adams would play his love interest, a gritty bartender and former college high jumper, with Christian Bale as his half-brother who kicks drugs and crime to train him. Following this would come Leap Year, set in Ireland, where Adams would put together an elaborate plan to propose to her boyfriend on the only day permitted by Irish tradition. Unfortunately, bad weather and a host of other distractions bar her way to Dublin.

As a mid-West hoofer who had no real thought of acting till she was 24, Amy Adams has come an awfully long way. She's canoodled with DiCaprio, given the evil eye to Julia Roberts, shocked Will Ferrell and even stood up to Meryl Streep, as well as charming the critics with Junebug and the world with Enchanted. And she's been Oscar nominated twice. There should be plenty more where those came from.

Dominic Wills