Career
Born in Manhattan, New York, Makkena started her acting career in 1986 and appeared in the TV show Santa Barbara. She later landed her first movie role in Eight Men Out. She has made various guest appearances in TV shows such as Law & Order, Monsters, NYPD Blue, House, and NCIS.
In 1992 she landed a starring role in the popular movie Sister Act as the shy but talented singing nun Sister Mary Robert, a role she reprised in Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit the following year.
She appeared in various other television roles until 1997, when she starred in Air Bud, followed by the independent film Finding North. She continued appearing on television shows such as The Job, Oliver Beene, and Listen Up!
She made a guest appearance on House in 2007. She also made a guest appearance on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in 2009.
Makkena also appeared on the pilot episode of Chuck as an unnamed National Intelligence Director. Some casting lists have her appearing as General Mary Beckman, a rank and surname that would be re-used in future episodes for the recurring character of NSA director Gen. Diane Beckman. The actress in that role, Bonita Friedericy, believes both Beckmans to be the same character. Additionally, Beckman's identification card, shown on "Chuck's Chart" (first seen in the second season episode, "Chuck Versus the Lethal Weapon", and clearly referring to Friedericy's character by its reference to her relationship with Roan Montgomery) reads "Gen. M. Beckman".
Among her Broadway credits are Lend Me a Tenor (1989) and Side Man (1998).
She currently has a recurring role in NCIS as Dr. Rachel Cranston, a psychologist conducting evaluations on Gibbs and his team who is also the older sister of the deceased Caitlin Todd played by Sasha Alexander.
Read more about this topic: Wendy Makkena
Famous quotes containing the word career:
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)
“The problem, thus, is not whether or not women are to combine marriage and motherhood with work or career but how they are to do so—concomitantly in a two-role continuous pattern or sequentially in a pattern involving job or career discontinuities.”
—Jessie Bernard (20th century)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)