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Stockard Channing remembers the moment she knew she had to become an actor. "I was 19," she says, sitting in her dressing room at Studio 54, where she is starring in the Roundabout Theatre Company's revival of Pal Joey. "I was in an undergraduate production at Harvard of Threepenny Opera. A close friend was directing and had said he thought I could play Jenny Diver. I was married to a Harvard Business School person. I planned to be a very well-educated housewife and mother. But I said, 'Sure, why not?'"

It was, she thinks, a dress rehearsal. "I got on the stage and started singing 'Pirate Jenny.' And suddenly I knew how to do it. My imagination clicked into gear — my performance instinct, my intellectual capacity. All cylinders hit. And I was blown out of the water. I was blown out of my life. And, as it were, I ran off and joined the circus."

After more than 40 years in the circus that is the acting profession, Channing is best known for her roles as Rizzo in the 1978 movie version of "Grease," Ouisa Kittredge in John Guare's 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation and as first lady Abbey Bartlet in the long-running and highly praised TV series "The West Wing." She has five Tony nominations, including one Tony Award for her Best-Actress performance in Joe Egg in 1985. She was last on Broadway in 1999, in The Lion in Winter, for which she received a Tony nomination.

Vera Simpson, says Channing, "really thinks she has her life well in hand. She's unhappily married to a rich guy in the 1930s, in a time when the world and the economy are in great flux. I don't think Vera was to the manner born. I think she married this guy because she wanted to have a rich, prosperous life. She was as hungry as Joey is, in her own way. She's a woman of the world. She's a little amoral. She acts out to spite her husband, who's not around very much, and she spends his money and takes lovers. And she takes another lover, who happens to be Joey, and she falls in love with him, although she's very much aware of his limitations. She thinks she can handle him. She thinks that her knowledge of him is going to be enough to keep her from having her heart broken. But it doesn't. She deludes herself in the name of love. That's the way it works in life." Continued...