After graduation, she joined Circle in the Square Professional Theater Workshop, where she worked with fellow students Ken Olin and Kevin Bacon, among others. Her acting résumé filled up with roles on and off-Broadway. Her Broadway credits include Death and the King's Horseman, written and directed by Nobel Prize laureate Wole Soyinka; Romantic Comedy and Dancing in the End Zone. Off-Broadway and at the nation's top regional theaters, she starred in Agnes of God, Gypsy, The Glass Menagerie, Private Lives and The Tempest, among others. Jill is also a founding member and President of GLM Productions, through which she produced the off-Broadway revue, Serious Business, and co-produced the student Academy Award-nominated documentary film, Gibbs Garden, a profile of a painter with AIDS.

Ms. Larson garnered more film and television roles, with her early forays generally as a sight gag; among them the memorable frenetic disco dancer alongside Joe Piscopo on Saturday Night Live; a tall skinny wife to a fat wrestler in Piscopo's film, Wise Guys; and a stint on David Letterman. Other television parts followed, including guest appearances on Kate and Allie, The Equalizer, and the ABC Afterschool Special, Over the Limit.

In 1986, Ms. Larson made her daytime television debut as bitchy TV columnist Judith Clayton on As the World Turns; and in 1988 she played psychotic kidnapper Ursula Blackwell on ABC's One Life to Live.

While playing Opal, Jill has also appeared in Dearly Departed at New York's Second Stage Theater, The Lost Dreams and Hidden Frustration of Every Woman in Brooklyn at the Soho Rep Theater, Hysterical Blindness, directed by Jared Harris, and Riders to the Sea, by John Millington Synge. Other film roles include White Squall, starring Jeff Bridges, and Vertical City.

A recent journey has led her to her greatest joy of all, the adoption of her beautiful daughter, Anni-Ming, whom she brought home from Shanghai in June 1996. Ms. Larson and Anni-Ming live in Manhattan and spend weekends at their country home in Pennsylvania. In addition to playing with Anni-Ming, she also enjoys anything relating to food, as well as home improvement-type projects.

Ms. Larson still finds time to volunteer at the 52nd Street Project, which helps inner-city youths get started in theater by encouraging their writing and performance talent.

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