From Advertising Exec to Actor

At age 50, Charmaine Reedy lost her high-powered corporate job. Instead of trying to replace it, she followed her heart and went into show business.

Charmaine Reedy was 50 when NBC closed the San Francisco office where she was Director of National Advertising Sales for the cable networks CNBC and MSNBC. Rather than seek another job in the field where she’d worked more than 20 years, she headed for the stage and screen. “All my life, I wanted to be an actor,” she says. Now, four years later, she's living her dream.
   As a child, Reedy endured ribbing from her five siblings about wanting to be a movie star. "It was kind of not something you could really do,” she says. She grew up in San Jose, California, the daughter of a police officer and a stay-at-home mom, in a strongly Catholic family where “there was always an emphasis on hard work, on striving.” An older sister is a judge; her older brother retired as acting chief of police in San Jose.
    Reedy’s husband, a retail analyst consultant, encouraged her to pursue acting. Then, six months later, shortly before their 24th wedding anniversary, he told her he wanted a divorce. “I didn’t see it coming,” she says. “It was a double-whammy. I was devastated and heart-broken. I had to decide, what am I going to do. I had to figure everything out.”
    Fortunately, she says, she already had a Manhattan apartment, purchased for visits during her NBC job, and she had savings. So she moved east and gave herself a jump-start by writing her own one-woman play, Barry White Saved My Life.“I realized I would have to make it happen,” she says. “No casting director or agent was sitting around saying, ‘Where can we find the next big thing? I know, a 50-year-old woman!’”
   In her play, she portrays five characters, including a woman trying to get past the velvet rope at an exclusive club and the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. She developed the stories, and honed her craft, by performing at open mike nights in small clubs around New York. Some tales were about adjusting to being alone again. “Part of the therapy for me was getting on stage and performing and writing material.”
Another thing that’s gotten her through, she says, is her practice of Nichiren Buddhism, which she began when she was 28. “This hasn’t been easy. I would often lie in a fetal position and weep,” says Reedy, who is 54, slim, blue-eyed and blond. She looks stylish in snug jeans and velour top as she drinks tea at a pastry shop near her new home. When she speaks about her loneliest days, a vulnerable look passes over her expressive face.
   Her open-mike gigs led to tours with a group of storytellers called The Moth. One performance, in 2007, was hosted by Amy Sedaris and Andy Borowitz—and she actually got paid for it. Also in that year, she hired a director and put on her play, Barry White Save My Life. (The singer’s hit song, “You’re the First, the Last, My Everything,” has a role in the plot.) She sent out post cards and invited as many influential people as she could. “I created my own buzz,” she says. Donna Hanover, the performer and former wife of Rudy Giuliani, came and promoted it on her radio show.