Amy Hill is delighted to be co-starring as Mary, the sassy secretary on ABC’s new Friday sit-com “Hot Properties,” but she’s feeling a little time-warped.
“My very first sitcom was at ABC on ‘All-American Girl’ and now, 10 years later, I’m back — and younger!” she jokes.
That’s because Hill, then only 41, played Margaret Cho’s grandmother in that short-lived sitcom. It didn’t ruffle her vanity at all, she says.
“I always thought of myself as a character actor,” Hill says. “Even in high school, I was playing mothers, whatever, anything for drama. We even did a production of Peter Brook’s controversial play ‘Marat/Sade.’ I was pretty advanced.”
But then, Hill had known since childhood she would probably wind up in the arts. “When I was a kid, I performed on the front porch for the Italians across the street,” she says. “They would actually sit in their picture window like they were watching TV. I didn’t think it was weird, but then, nothing much seems weird when you’re 8 years old.”
After college, Hill began seriously to pursue an acting career at San Francisco’s acclaimed American Conservatory Theater and the Asian American Theatre Company, and she cut her comedy chops performing with the city’s various improv groups.
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Born: May 9, 1953, in Deadwood, S.D.
Family ties: Parents were a Finnish-American meat inspector and a Japanese homemaker-cook; one brother, one sister, neither in the arts.
TV credits include: “All-American Girl”; “Pauly”; “The Naked Truth”; “StripMall”; “Reno 911”; “Frasier”; “The Closer”; “North Shore”; “Six Feet Under”; “Without a Trace.”
