Rondi Reed

Hometown: "Dixon, Illinois, Ronald Reagan's hometown," Reed offers before quipping in a reporter-like voice, "'she says with a bit of chagrin.' The hometown newspaper just did an article about me, talking about 'see what can happen to a little girl from a tiny town who dreams big?' Then, of course, they had to mention Ronald Reagan in the last paragraph. It's just like, ugh."

Currently: Finishing up her Tony-nominated run as cantankerous aunt Mattie Fae in Tracy Letts' Pulitzer Prize-winning August: Osage County. "When we opened August in Chicago last summer, if somebody had said to me, 'A year from now, you're going to be in a hit Broadway play and be nominated for a Tony,' I would've said, 'What drugs are you on?'"

Onstage/Offstage: While her August co-stars Deanna Dunagan and Amy Morton have gone on record about how taxing their roles are, Reed admits that Mattie Fae doesn't carry such a huge load. "I love these kinds of parts. I come in, say my five lines, make an impact and leave. It's great!" she says with a laugh. "I don't have to schlog through the whole thing." Reed's status as a go-to character actress may limit her monologues onstage, but offstage, she's clearly got a gift for gab. "My ex-husband used to say, 'Just drop a nickel in her slot and she'll talk.'"

The Bee in Her Bonnet: As a little girl, Reed was a voracious reader who didn't mind showing off her skills in class, "'reading expressively,' as they put it. I would break my arm off trying to volunteer to do it all the time." Then her school announced a production of Johnny Appleseed, and Reed learned she could stand in the front row, provided she wore a bonnet. "My mom was like, 'I don't have a bonnet! I can't make you a bonnet!'" Being an aspiring young actress, Reed took the logical next step: She dug out her younger sister's Easter outfit, jammed the bonnet on her head and was soon singing front and center. "And thus it began!"

Wolf at the Door: While attending Illinois State University, Reed fell in with a group of like-minded drama fiends who formed what she calls "a hotbed of creativity out in the cornfield." They staged their own shows and worked till all hours. After relocating to Chicago in 1979, the group—now dubbed the Steppenwolf Theatre Company—gave Reed a chance to take on roles she'd never have gotten otherwise. "I was always playing somebody's mother. I was Fanny Brice's mother in Funny Girl. I was Frau Schmidt in The Sound of Music and one of the wives in Li'l Abner, if you can believe someone was still doing a production of Li'l Abner." Steppenwolf's eagerness to take on anything, what Reed calls its "fearlessness/stupidity," allowed her to stretch and even play the ingenue. "Things started to turn for me when I did Fool for Love with [CSI star] William L. Petersen. Something sort of clicked in my acting—where I fit in, what I was capable of, my strengths and weaknesses."

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Though she made her Broadway debut in a small part in Steppenwolf's Tony Award-winning adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath in 1990, Reed didn't really become a Broadway baby until she was called in for the role of Madame Morrible in the Chicago production of Wicked. "They practically had to drug me into going in to audition. I was more excited about meeting [director] Joe Mantello than anything else." She was quickly offered the role, and says now, "That was a baptism into a whole other level of musicals for me—the hugeness of the production, just the high level of everything."

She Can't Say No: Tracy Letts wrote the part of Mattie Fae especially for Reed, but since she liked her steady Wicked gig, she turned him down. Four times, to be exact. Letts wouldn't give up so easily. "He enlisted other people to bug me. Every place I'd turn, somebody would say, 'You have to do this play. Tracy wants you.'" A break in the Wicked schedule allowed her to take part in August's world premiere at Steppenwolf, and when Wicked producer David Stone caught the show, he urged her to go to New York with the play, granting a "creative hiatus." Not that her work as Madame Morrible is done: "I'm getting back to it, right after the Tonys. People think I'm certifiable, but that show's been incredibly loyal to me."

The Country Girl: For now, Reed is loving life as a Tony-nominated actress in New York City: meeting Faith Prince and Linda Lavin, ordering takeout lunches, not schlepping groceries up eight flights of stairs to her apartment. As for Tony night, Reed quick-changes back into a no-nonsense Illinois native. "I'm from the Midwest, where you're taught very early not to brag about yourself. I've never even set foot in Radio City Music Hall. I really do feel like a country bumpkin, as far as that's concerned." Still, the Tonys are a great opportunity to celebrate the fact that she said "yes" to Tracy Letts. "The things that I think are going to be big hits turn out to be bombs and the ones I think are no big deal are big hits," Reed says with a laugh. "I'm at that point in my career where I'm like, 'Just shut up and listen to everybody else.'"