in its second season,and while it isn’t her first TV appearance since she was found guilty of paying a bribe to land her daughter a place in an elite university,it is the clearest indication that her time in career purgatory may be coming to an end.
In October 2019,Felicity Huffman served 11 days of a 14-day term in prison over the college admissions scandal.AP
In September 2019,,250 hours of community service,a year’s probation and a $30,000 fine for her part in the so-called college admissions scandal. She was released three days early because her scheduled release date fell on a weekend.
The 61-year-old,who is married to 73-year-old actor William H Macy,was among more than 50 people caught in the FBI’s Operation Varsity Blues. She was one of 33 parents accused of paying bribes worth more than $25 million to admissions administrator William Rick Singer to ensure their kids got inflated marks or athletic assessments that guaranteed a place in elite educational institutions.
Huffman allegedly paid $15,000 to secure a place for the couple’s eldest daughter,Sophia,but the offer was rescinded when news of the scandal broke.
However,Sophia went on to finish high school that year,and in 2020 enrolled in the theatre program at Carnegie Mellon University,a course for which an SAT entrance score is not required.
Huffman is married to William H Macy,with whom she has two adult daughters.Jordan Strauss
While,he was not charged. Huffman has insisted throughout that.
“In my desperation to be a good mother,I talked myself into believing that all I was doing was giving my daughter a fair shot,” Huffman wrote to the judge ahead of sentencing. “I see the irony in that statement now because what I have done is the opposite of fair. I have broken the law,deceived the educational community,betrayed my daughter,and failed my family.”
In his own letter to the court,Macy wrote that his wife’s relationship with her daughters “exploded” when the scandal surfaced in March 2019. He added in that letter that the family had been in therapy since his wife’s arrest,and noted that “every good thing in my life is because of Felicity Huffman”.
Notwithstanding the disruptions of COVID and the Hollywood strikes,Macy has been reasonably busy since the scandal erupted,with roles in the seriesThe Dropout (starring Amanda Seyfried as medical scammer Elizabeth Holmes),his long-running seriesShameless,as the voice of a Supreme Court judge in the podcastSupreme:The Battle For Roe,and in the shot-in-Australia comedyRicky Stanicky from Bobby Farrelly,co-creator ofDumb and Dumber andThere’s Something About Mary.
'Desperate Housewives' star paid US$15,000 to have daughter's SAT exam secretly corrected.
In February … she’s in London doing a play and I’m going to go see her. It’s been too long.”
Huffman has been quietly raising her head above the parapet too. In June 2023,she was the voice of the wife of Macy’s judge on theSupreme podcast. In November,she gave her first television interview since going to jail,in which she said of the bribe “I know this seems crazy … but it felt like I would be a bad mother if I didn’t do it. So,I did it.”
In February this year, in the UK,in which she took a more contrite line. “I walk into the room with it,” she said of the crime. “I did it. It’s black and white.”
She was speaking as she was about to star on the London stage inHir,a comedy about a disintegrating family,in which she plays a woman who strikes back against the man who has abused her for years with a radical embrace of queerness.
Desperate Housewives,the series that made Huffman (rear left) a star.Supplied
Huffman was nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for playing a trans woman inTransamerica. It was,she toldThe Guardian,a role she “wouldn’t do now”.
For a long time,it seemed there weren’t many roles Felicity Hufffman would be allowed to do. A pilot she shot in 2020,Sacramento River Cats Project,never went to air.
But in March last year,she cropped up in an episode ofThe Good Doctor as a lawyer.
Now,she’s about to appear as a character described as “a brilliant biological psychiatrist who agrees to help the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit investigate a murderous conspiracy theory”.
Anyone inclined to analyse Huffman’s recent behaviour might conclude she’s finally been let out of Hollywood jail.
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