Anna Chlumsky’s Journey:
December 3, 1980, saw the birth of Anna Chlumsky in Chicago, Illinois. She was raised in an aspirational family with a peculiar but distant relationship to Hollywood. Her mother worked for Eastern Airlines before becoming Anna’s manager and coach, and her father was a saxophonist, restaurant owner, and cookery instructor at Kendall College in Chicago. Her great-grandfather reportedly had a trained bear that starred in The Three Stooges movies.
In the 1991 romantic family movie My Girl, Anna Chlumsky played the scene-stealing part of Vada Sultenfuss, the charming mortician’s daughter, which marked the beginning of her career as one of Hollywood’s top female child stars. She became famous suddenly at the age of eleven, and she even shared her first on-screen kiss with Macaulay Culkin, her co-star and another child star.
Anna Chlumsky reprised the part in the less successful sequel My Girl 2 (1994) and continued to perform in a number of movies and TV series during the late 1990s thanks to her innate acting talent and attractiveness beyond her years.
Anna Chlumsky made the decision to put her acting career on hold in order to concentrate on her schooling, surrendering her rising trajectory in Hollywood, in contrast to many child stars whose renown faded without leaving much behind.
She had a steady career as a character actress in movies and television after making a comeback to the big screen in 2005. Although her iconic portrayal as Vada had already cemented her place in Hollywood history, her major comeback occurred when she was cast in a prominent supporting role in the political comedy Veep (HBO, 2012–).
Anna CHlumsky’s mother signed her up for a local modeling agency when she was still a small child. She modeled sporadically for several years, appearing in department-store advertising and the Sears catalog. She attended Grace Lutheran Church and School before to Walther Lutheran High School.
Eventually, this cute little girl went beyond print advertisements and debuted in the family comedy classic Uncle Buck (1989), starring the amazing John Candy and future child star Macaulay Culkin, who was crucial to her early success.
Eleven-year-old Chlumsky’s life abruptly changed in 1991. In the romantic comedy My Girl, which also starred Dan Aykroyd, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Macaulay Culkin, the biggest young star in Hollywood at the time, she defeated hundreds of young girls to play the intelligent and inquisitive Vada Margaret Sultenfuss.
Even though she wasn’t the formal protagonist, Anna Chlumsky, who plays the daughter of a funeral home owner in the 1970s who attempts to ruin her widower father’s personal life, not only held her own against Culkin but nearly stole the show and became an immediate phenomenon.
But unlike her youthful co-star, Anna Chlumsky continued to have aspirations of becoming a paleontologist or working with horses. Her aspirations in life were never limited to acting. She reportedly declined a part in the 1992 family movie Beethoven because she wasn’t convinced she would be a kid star. Her early momentum was slowed when she vanished from the cinema for three years following an unsuccessful audition for the part of Lex in the upcoming blockbuster Jurassic Park (1993).
She starred in the family fantasy Trading Mom in 1994 and made an appearance in the inevitable, Culkin-free sequel My Girl 2. She starred opposite Christina Ricci in the mystery-adventure movie Gold Diggers: The Secret of Bear Mountain (1995), where the now-15-year-old did her own stunts.
A few years later, Anna debuted on television alongside John Ritter and Tess Harper in the drama A Child’s Wish (CBS, 1997). In addition, she acted in the romantic comedy series Cupid (ABC, 1998–1999), the fantasy-drama Early Edition (CBS, 1996–2000), and the television drama Miracle in the Woods (CBS, 1997) as Gina Weatherby/Field Pea, which co-starred Meredith Baxter and Della Reese.
Anna Chlumsky, who wasn’t even twenty yet, made the decision to stop acting and go back to school. She decided to major in International Studies at the University of Chicago. She participated in university theatrical plays like Into the Woods, Nine, Words, Words, and Words while she was there. After earning her BA in 2002, she worked as a restaurant guide researcher in Manhattan with the goal of becoming a food reviewer.
She was an editing assistant for HarperCollins Publishers and a fact-checker for Zagat Survey. However, she quickly discovered that these positions didn’t satisfy her, so she made the decision to go back to acting. She trained at the Atlantic Acting School in Manhattan since she was determined to take her career rebuilding seriously.
Her next on-screen performance, as the lead character Kara in the short film Wait, opposite Tyson Beckford and Debi Mazar, occurred in 2005. She was never one to rush. She also played a significant part in Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead (2005) at the American Theatre of Actors and The Colonel’s Holiday (2005) with New York’s Poor Artists Collective.
After that, she was cast in a number of movies and TV shows, such as the popular NBC drama Law & Order (1990–2010), the sitcom 30 Rock (NBC, 2006–2013), and the comedy-horror thriller Blood Car (2007).
Her next significant role was as State Department aide Liza Weld, opposite Peter Capaldi, Tom Hollander, Chris Addison, and James Gandolfini in the BBC political satire In the Loop (2009). She starred in The Public Theater’s Off-Broadway production of Unconditional (2009) that same year.
After then, Anna Chlumsky starred in a number of movies, including the romantic comedy The Good Guy (2009), the TV drama House Rules (2009) on ABC, and several cameos in Cupid.
With a supporting part in Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s sitcom Veep (HBO, 2012–), Anna Chlumsky made her full-time comeback to television. For her work on the program, she was nominated for an Emmy in 2014 for Best Supporting Actress in a Comedy.
Before playing a supporting part in the 2015 biographical picture The End of the Tour, which was based on the life of David Foster Wallace, she also made an appearance in a story arc on Bryan Fuller’s atmospheric horror series Hannibal (NBC, 2013–16).