Jaime Ray Newman

Making a name with a memorable series of recurring turns on such shows as The CW's "Veronica Mars" (UPN/CW, 2004-07) and SyFy's "Eureka" (2006-12), Jamie Ray Newman scored a breakthrough lead on network television as a mousy homemaker coming out of her shell on ABC's fall 2009 occult drama "Eastwick" (2009). A zealous devotee of theater from a young age - producing professional plays when she was only 16 - Newman established her acting career as so many buzz-worthy young actresses before her by appearing in daytime television - specifically "General Hospital" (ABC, 1963- ). Earning a reputation as a go-to actor for textured roles - from sweet young things to comely brainiacs to scheming femme fatales - Newman made a name for herself as a prolific TV presence and burgeoning star.

Newman was born April 2, 1978, into a Jewish family in Farmington Hills, MI. By age six, she was reportedly singing at bar-mitzvahs. She won over scouts for a local theater company when they came to her middle school looking for a child actress for their staging of a new Israel Horowitz play. After begging her reticent parents, she trod the boards professionally for the first time at age 12 in a Detroit production of Horowitz's "A Rosen by Any Other Name." Attending Cranbrook Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills, MI, her precocious qualities essayed into an remarkable, driven passion for the theater, manifesting in the 16-year-old Newman's founding of her own stage company, Apollo Theatre Productions, via which she put up multiple productions before graduating high school, hiring actors and crew, producing and directing and staging each event in a rented theater. Also while in high school, she spent summers at the prestigious Interlochen Center for the Arts in Northern Michigan, consistently standing out in productions. One year, she earned the Corson Award for Outstanding Achievement in Acting and she also took first-place awards three years running at the statewide speech and drama competition held by the Michigan Interscholastic Forensic Association.

She graduated in 1996, moving to Boston to study theater at Boston University. After two years there, she transferred to Northwestern University, majoring in English and drama and, proving her enterprising nature once again by producing plays and starting a women's arts festival. She expanded her talents into the musical realm, discovering a particular affinity for jazz and singing with local bands. She moved to Los Angeles in 2000, and the next year, managed to score a guest shot on ABC's "The Drew Carey Show" (1995-2004), followed by a cast job with the long-running ABC soap opera "General Hospital" (1963- ), sticking with the show through 2003 as Kristina Cassadine, scion of the show's stalwart, ever-troubled Cassadine family.

Newman also resumed her music career, eventually founding and singing with the band School Boy Crush. The busy actress peppered her resume with a flurry of one-off TV roles and made-for-TV movies, netted a part in the Steven Spielberg feature "Catch Me If You Can" (2002), and made a splash on the L.A. theater scene, appearing in the blockbuster four-month run of the Roger Kumble play "Turnaround," co-starring David Schwimmer and Jonathan Silverman. She landed her first feature film lead in the 2005 indie, "Living 'til the End," playing a dying woman whose pacific outlook on her remaining time helps a young man deal with his own fear of death, as well as her first recurring TV series role, defying type as a tough military officer in the SyFy (then Sci Fi Channel) series "Stargate: Atlantis" (2004-09). She scored another recurring role in four episodes of the short-lived, Pentagon-set drama, "E-Ring" (NBC, 2005-06) and two TV-movie leads in "Under the Mistletoe" (Lifetime, 2006) and "I'm Paige Wilson" (2007), an inside-DC drama initially shot as a series pilot but not picked up by The CW.

The CW connection, however, paid off with Newman's most prominent stint in primetime - an eight-episode guest-starring arc on the final season of the network's soapy mystery series, "Veronica Mars," in which she played the conniving wife of a college dean. She became a much-in-demand recurring-role specialist, next doing a stint on the ABC Family Channel show "Lincoln Heights" (2006-09), two episodes of the racy FX drama "Nip/Tuck" (2003-10), three episodes of Fox's mid-season replacement drama "Mental" (2009), and an extended run as Dr. Tess Fontana, a brainy scientist, on the quirky SyFy show, "Eureka." In the spring of 2009, prolific hit-maker David Nutter - producer of such shows as "Smallville" (The WB/CW, 2001-11), "Without a Trace" (CBS, 2002-09), "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" (Fox, 2008-09) and "The Mentalist" (CBS, 2008-15) - tapped Newman to star alongside Lindsay Price and Rebecca Romjin as novice witches living in a New England town in "Eastwick," ABC's serialization of the novel by John Updike and the movie of the same name, "The Witches of Eastwick" (1987). The combination soap/occult thriller saw Newman playing Kat Rougemont, the put-upon housewife and mother who begins a process of self-actualization after discovering she has supernatural powers.