Annie Potts biography

"It seemed so easy to me then," Potts later recalled of her first years in Hollywood. "I thought, I don't know what people are talking about. This place is a snap."

Potts spent the next several years appearing in TV movies such as Ladies in Waiting (1979), The Scarlett O'Hara War (1980),

Something So Right (1982) and Remington Steele (1983). She then delivered her breakthrough performance as the sassy secretary Janine Melnitz in the 1984 blockbuster Ghostbusters. She would later appear in the 1989 sequel Ghostbusters II and perform voice acting for the Ghostbusters video game released in 2009.

Propelled by Ghostbusters, Potts received her next big role in the 1986 classic Pretty in Pink. That same year, she landed the role for which she is now best remembered: Mary Jo Shively, a redheaded divorcee who is one of a quartet of Southern women running an interior design firm in Atlanta on the long-running CBS sitcom Designing Women. Potts starred on the show for the duration of its seven-year run, from 1986 to 1993.

When Designing Women finally went off the air in 1993, Potts immediately landed a starring role in the television series Love & War, where she remained in the cast for two years, from 1993-95. The next year, in 1996, Potts played an inner city schoolteacher in the acclaimed but short-lived series Dangerous Minds, and she delivered another acclaimed performance as a white homemaker in 1960s Alabama who strikes up an improbable friendship with a black female attorney in the series Any Day Now (1998-2002).

Potts also played the voice of Bo Peep in Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1998). Potts' more recent appearances include the TV series Joan of Arcadia (2004-2005), Law & Order: SVU (2005-2009) and Marry Me (2010).

Even after four decades performing on television, in films and on the stage, Annie Potts' remarkable career is still going strong. In 2009, at the age of 57, she fulfilled a lifelong dream by performing on Broadway in the 2009 production of God of Carnage.

At this point in her career, Potts says that she continues to act simply because she cannot imagine what she would do with her life if she were to stop. "I am a real workhorse," she said. "I like to work 12-15 hours a day and go to sleep exhausted. If I don't, then I feel I have fallen short of what I ought to have been doing that day."

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