See Also: Marcia Cross (Bree Hodge) People Guide

Convinced her acting career had peaked and she wouldn't find a man who was good marriage material, ^{Marcia Cross} (Bree Hodge has admitted she almost gave up on them both.

She told Good Housekeeping magazine that she wasn't optimistic about the future just a few years ago. "I remember thinking, 'Wow, Okay, Maybe I'm done'," she said. "I started to feel like I didn't want to waste my life if I couldn't get to a better place professionally. I was definitely heading toward becoming a therapist." She also admitted with no husband in sight that she decided to adopt a baby, and that was what inspired her to audition for Housewives as Mary Alice Young. "I thought it would be a great part-time job for a single mom. Obviously it didn't work out that way," she joked.

Cross's single status was due to a mix of incompatible relationships and a tragedy. She recounted the death of Richard Jordan, her boyfriend of five years, when she was younger. "He died in me bed," she said, "and I learned a lot about this kind of person I as. And as young as I was, taking of him the way I did, giving him a good death, gave me some pride that I'd done something good, which I still feel."

But things have been looking up for Cross the past couple of years, and she said she believes that she can't take credit for all her recent good luck. But she did say that if you take "some responsibility for what you've created, then you have the power to change it." It's a quality that Marc Cherry picked up on when he first met Cross. "When I wrote the character of Bree, I thought that her strength is that she's a woman who says, 'I'm not going to freak out when my life is falling apart. I'm going to take action and do something'," he explained. "Marcia has a similar quality. She's had hard times, but she's smart enough to say, 'I'm going to deal with it and move on'."

The full interview can be found in the February 2007 issue of Good Housekeeping, which features a pregnant Cross on the cover. Thanks to Long December at TWoP for scans of the interview.

Discuss this news item at Talk Desperate!
 Add Get Desperate! RSS feed to your news reader or My Yahoo!
Also a CSI: Crime Scene Investigation fan? Then visit CSIFiles.com!