Connie Britton Is a Late Bloomer

Kevin Scanlon for The New York Times

Connie Britton

Connie Britton got over it a long time ago, the part that got away. But it's a good story, and she still tells it with feeling: The year was 1995. Edward Burns, who had just directed her (and starred in) "The Brothers McMullen," reached into his backpack one night over dinner and handed her a script that Cameron Crowe had sent him to read. Burns wasn't interested himself, wanting to act in his own films instead. But he thought Britton was perfect for the romantic lead.

"So I took it home and I read it," Britton said, sitting on the edge of the couch in her living room 18 years later. "I was blown away. I loved the script, the role — I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, this is incredible.' And I walked into my brand-new agent's office the next day, and I put the script down on his desk, and I was like, 'I have two words for you: Jerry Maguire.' " Britton giggled, but for only a moment, because the story was just beginning. She nailed the audition. Crowe told her she had shown him just what the character should be. A few months after that, she was flown to New York to do a reading with Tom Cruise.

The success of "The Brothers McMullen" notwithstanding, Britton was at this point not far removed from her days teaching aerobics and going on open-call auditions in New York. Now she started hearing that she was poised for stardom. She did a table read with the rest of the cast, and it was looking like a lock. The day she finally did a screen test with Cruise, Britton said, she heard that "they just want to screen-test one other actress." Britton laughed, this time a little more darkly. Of course it was Renée Zellweger, an actress so tiny and tousled that she looked newly hatched, who walked away with the part.

"It was heartbreak," Britton said. A decade came and went, a crucial decade in the life of an actress. Britton played some secondary roles on television, including an ensemble part on the sitcom "Spin City" and smaller recurring ones on "The West Wing" and "24." And then, 10 years after "Jerry Maguire" had its premiere without her, she was offered a part on a new network series, "Friday Night Lights." Britton thought the part, a football coach's wife, was most likely a nondescript role that would take her nowhere; she had played the same small role in the film of the same name. But her mother had just died, and she opted to skip the grueling auditions of pilot season to work with producers she knew and liked. She signed on.

"Friday Night Lights" turned Britton into something of an icon, a 40-something sex symbol and role model at the center of a critically acclaimed show (albeit one that was never a ratings smash). These days, the Internet is crowded with blog posts celebrating her exemplary television marriage, her maternal wisdom, the sheer amazingness of her hair. Britton, now 45, seemed to have emerged in her prime, redefining, in the process, what an actress's prime exactly is. "Jerry Maguire" may have been the best thing that never happened to her.

"Maybe I was too tall," Britton said, offering one theory of why she didn't land the part opposite Cruise. It's relatively easy to laugh about it now, in her home in her upscale neighborhood in Nashville, where her latest role has taken her. On ABC's "Nashville," Britton now plays the country-music star Rayna Jaymes, a legend trying to hold on to her perch. If Britton is still not yet exactly a megastar, she now plays one on TV, on a show that's another critical hit, having built the rare career for an actress, one that gets better with age.

Britton, sipping a glass of water with mint leaves, was watching her son, Eyob, a 2-year-old she adopted from Ethiopia in 2011, as he romped with the two family dogs, each of which was easily double his size. On her day off, Britton had clipped up her famous hair (the subject of not only its own admiring tumblr but also Twitter hashtags like #conniebrittonshair). She was dressed in leggings and a V-neck sweater, makeup-free, in tortoiseshell glasses and scuffed black boots; later, when she went out for the evening, she threw on a parka.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 16, 2013

An article on Page 20 this weekend about the actress Connie Britton, who starred in the television drama "Friday Night Lights," misidentifies the season in which her character became a high school principal. It was the show's third season, not its first.

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