This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Felicity Huffman is smart, funny, beautiful and talented. For seven seasons, she's starred as frazzled wife and mother Lynette Scavo on "Desperate Housewives."
And she didn't get the part the way she originally thought she did. And Huffman really, really wanted the part of Lynette.
"When a good script comes along during pilot season, the drumbeat goes out because there's only a couple that everyone's going, 'Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,'" she said. "And this was one of them."
But on the day of her audition, she was trying to get her two children - ages 2 and 3 - out of the bathtub and get herself ready to meet "Desperate Housewives" creator/executive producer Marc Cherry.
"You know, two small kids, and - as I've said before - motherhood does not come naturally to me," Huffman said. "So I pulled myself together, and I blow dried my hair, and I put on nice clothes, and I looked great. I drove there in the rain. I sat there. They said, 'Come in and read.' I came in and read. I got the part. I was very excited.
"It was only later when I talked to Marc Cherry and I said, 'How did you know?' He said, 'Oh, it was great because, when you came in, you were such a mess. You had, like, food stains on you, and your hair was awful, and you looked like (expetive). And that's how we knew.'"