Episode 85: Kate Miller

Never Let a Closed Door Keep You Out.

Kate Miller has had a prolific career as an actress – from starring on Broadway with Carol Burnett in Moon Over Buffalo, to working the soap opera scene in New York on One Life to Live, to working opposite Tom Selleck in CBS’s Blue Bloods, to her latest role as Amanda Shaw in Hightown, Kate has done it all. Not bad for a woman I met in her 20’s playing a rambunctious Tatiana in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a theater company performing on the streets of New York City.

 In an industry that is known for discarding women after a certain age, Kate did the impossible and reinvented herself and her career in her 40’s – in Los Angeles! Despite the doors being closed to her. As she says no one in Hollywood was interested in her when she showed up to begin her television career in Hollywood Land. But she persisted and those doors eventually opened to her.

Today, Kate is sanguine about those times she was wandering in the wilderness of an industry that worships at the altar of youth. Kate used those hard times and the down times that she faced, as a catalyst for huge growth and personal changes that she says were necessary. She got married. She bought a house. Made a posthumous peace with a mother with whom she had a complex relationship. All the stuff that grown people hopefully do – settle into their life. Learn a few lessons. Live.

 Kate’s take on her journey comes with time served in the hurly burly of life. She says, it’s time to put down your pain and focus on what is good in your life. And “Just because you don’t get something you want, desire, are seeking for, it has nothing to do with your merit.”