You know her as the way-too-perky Progressive insurance pitchwoman, Flo, a character so recognizable she's been named one of the top female ad icons of all time, alongside Betty Crocker and Rosie the Riveter. But it took Stephanie Courtney years to get her big break as an actress. Rather than get discouraged, she just kept auditioning. Courtney shares her journey of how she went from being a fledgling wannabe actress to becoming a skilled, in-demand comedic talent.

From an early age, I was influenced by the greats. My mom was a big fan of musicals, and my dad loved film noir and comedies. These amazing movies from the '30s to the '60s were always playing in our house, and I had heard every Broadway recording.

We had a great proximity to Broadway from Stony Point, New York. I remember seeing Kevin Kline in The Pirates of Penzance, and he stole the show. He was this fresh graduate from Juilliard, and he was handsome and funny and he could sing. I remember thinking, Oh, it's possible to make this a job.

It never occurred to me to go on New York auditions. I had a very normal childhood other than the fact that I was in plays all the time. By the time I got to middle school, we did a play a year, and I was in all of them. In high school, we did a fall and a spring musical, and I was always in one of those. I would even show up to rehearsals I wasn't supposed to be at. I loved everything about it, and I was never bored by it.

We had this off-Broadway-level theater in our hometown called the Penguin Repertory Theatre. I auditioned for a scholarship and I didn't get it, but I remember I still wanted to do this. Nothing could knock me down too hard to dissuade me from pursuing this as a career.

Kimberly Genevieve

My dad was very much like, "Go to college!" It was a foregone conclusion that if I had the grades, I'd go to Binghamton University because it was a really good school and it was nearby. I got in and thought, Great, I'll get my English degree, then I can go on with my life. I did plays, plays, plays, and then one year, one of my acting teachers said, "You should really go to a Meisner technique class." It's an improv-based acting technique. I had a friend who had graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, and she put in a good word for me. I graduated from Binghamton, and I got squeezed into one of the last classes at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where I spent two years studying acting.

When I got there, I felt like, Oh my god, I belong here. These are my people. Everyone's in their 20s, everyone's dramatic, and it's crazy, but it was great. That's when I also realized that I was going to have a bunch of survival jobs and I would have to get comfortable with being fired a lot.

I lived with two cousins who had jobs and I worked first as a waitress, which didn't last very long. I am a terrible waitress. Then I worked at a gourmet Italian grocery store for a while. Then my aunt got me a job answering phones at Smith Barney [brokerage firm]. I would go to school from 9 to 5 and then I'd walk up four blocks and I'd answer night calls for the CEO. It was just me in this big, empty office building from 6 to 11. They'd give you cab money to go home, and I'd pocket it and just walk. That was my life for the last year of acting school. From then on, it was lots of temping and lots of catering for many, many years.

I was auditioning a lot. In New York City, if you don't have representation, which I certainly didn't, you look in Backstage Magazine and find auditions. If you're auditioning for a theater company, you'd wake up at 5, sit outside on the street to sign up for a spot, then go home, shower, and come back at your time and audition. I had the attitude that, this is all new and I'm just going to suck until I suck less and less. I never felt like, Man, you should not be doing this. If I didn't get the job, that was OK. I knew there were things I could learn, but I felt like I belonged there.

I got my first job pretty soon with Theatreworks USA, which is how a lot of people get their equity card. The job was to perform for children. So we'd get in a van, drive around, stay in Motel 6s, and show up at an elementary school and do two musicals. Then we'd pack up the van and drive to another city. We did that for three months, and at the end of it, I got my equity card, which means I was in the union for stage actors. I got paid better, and I qualified for health insurance.

A lot of people do those tours. They're fun, but they're tough. I booked that tour right after graduating from Neighborhood Playhouse in 1994. Then 1995 to 1996 were auditioning years — and catering — where I did plays with friends, wrote my own material, that kind of thing.

In 2000, I wrote a play with my sister called Those Courtney Girls. It was in the Aspen Comedy Festival. We wrote these little vignettes of living together completely broke. It was based on our lives with our personalities exaggerated. She was a loser who could fake her way through life. I was a loser with few redeeming qualities. The scenes would be broken up by our mother's worried voice mail messages. I don't think it made a big splash, but it was a good experience and taught me that you meet people wherever you go. We met Fred Armisen and Darlene Hunt, who went on to write The Big C. They came up from the audience to be extras in our show.

Kimberly Genevieve

In 1996, a friend of mine from the Playhouse was putting together a show called "Newborn Comics — Actors Who Stand Up!" She invited me and said I had two weeks to come up with six minutes to perform in a comedy club. That changed everything for me. Comedy felt a lot more comfortable. To write my own material, I just thought about the stories I tell my friends that make them laugh. It's empowering to be your own writer. It's a much healthier way to approach this business, which can feel a lot like waiting and hoping that you're picked. This is having fun on my own terms.

Stand-up was a lot easier than trying to stage a play at a theater. I could perform and be seen without having to spend a lot of money looking for a location to rent. Later that year, Naomi Odenkirk saw me doing stand-up at a comedy club in New York City. They approached me and said, "If you're interested in representation, move to L.A. and we'll be your managers." By that time, it had been some fun but very hard years. So I was like, "Absolutely!"

In 1997, my sister and I moved to L.A. One night, we saw a show at the Groundlings and I was blown away. It felt a lot more like acting to me than stand-up because there was someone with an acting partner up there. I signed up for classes the next day and started going through that program. I was hoping to go as far as I could get, which meant joining the main Groundlings company. I also felt that if it didn't work out, that was OK. I can still go on auditions and keep moving forward.

When I moved to L.A., I instantly realized there's so much more opportunity. Those beginning years when my parents were like, "What are you doing?" I said, "My job is auditioning." You have to get better and better at it, so when you get that audition that is make-or-break or is the one you're meant to get, you are relaxed and you're better at it. And that only comes from doing 100 of them. Some of them were great, some were bad, some I had a cold, some I wanted so much it was creepy. Some of them I didn't even think about and I got the part. The average of it was that you're getting better. The best advice I can give to anyone is to get out there and dare to be imperfect. Prepare as best as you can and just show up.

Making money was always tough. And commercials are hard. You make a lot of money at once, but [residuals] depend on how they play. I would book maybe under one commercial a year, just enough that I would keep auditioning. So I had a lot of day jobs. I answered phones during the day at a nightclub. I worked behind the counter of a restaurant. I babysat a ton. I was a personal assistant for hire. I catered a ton.

My first national commercial was a Bud Light commercial in 1999. They played it during the Super Bowl. I had a little part in it, but when I got paid, I thought I had made it. I quit all my day jobs, and then six months later I was like, "I need my job back, please."

Kimberly Genevieve

I did a McDonald's commercial, Quaker Oats, Wienerschnitzel, and a small Internet commercial. At that point, I don't think anyone noticed me in those commercials. It was never, "Who is that girl?" I would be the girl in the back of the line looking annoyed. Commercials are great and I loved booking them for the money, but I was actually working more in TV.

In 2006, I booked more TV than I ever had. It was Mad Men and The Comeback and some nice stuff. But it was cable, which doesn't pay like network TV, so I couldn't pay my bills on acting alone. That was the only time I felt really discouraged. I was doing everything right. I was booking the big shows, but it wasn't paying the bills. I didn't know how to do this and make a living.

Then more commercial work came. Right before I booked Progressive, I booked three other commercials — Skittles, Toyota, and one more I can't remember. I felt good. Maybe that relaxed me enough before going into Progressive. I knew it was meant to be a big campaign, but I had no idea what it looked like. When you're auditioning, you basically know something like, "It's a girl behind a counter," so you get your polo shirt on and you show up. With commercial auditions, less is usually more, but this was a big character. She was funny, she loved her job, and she loved her customers. So I thought, She'll love them to a fault where she's walking the line of crazy. It's like the love just spills over and becomes a tiny bit inappropriate. That's what I came up with in the audition room.

I had a friend from my improv world and a friend from my stand-up world both at the callback with me. And we made a joke that whoever gets the job has to buy everyone a drink. I've taken one of them out to dinner, and I still have to take the other one out.

I got the call a few days later that I got the job. Getting this job was such a 180. It became my identity. I booked Flo and shot the first one in late December of 2007. Then they started airing it in January, and shortly after that it became a steady job. I quit all of my other day jobs for good. I started to realize that as the campaign went on, auditioning for commercials felt futile. I'd go in to the room and they would say hi and then slowly they would realize, Oh, that's the girl from the Progressive commercials.

Now it's all Flo and any other acting work I get. Because I had been auditioning for TV and film for 10 years before I booked Flo, the casting people know me. And casting agents really pull for their actors — those of us they've seen time and time again. So every once in awhile they call me in for things. I had a role in The Heartbreak Kid and a part on the first season of You're the Worst, which was really fun. And I'm now known to a children's audience because I played a neighborhood mom in this movie called Fred: The Show.

And my comedy friends have moved up in the world and are doing their own shows so I get to play with them, like do a crazy character on The Mike Tyson Mysteries.

Kimberly Genevieve

Sometimes I feel like I have a double life. I am made up so hardcore for Flo. My hair is teased to the heavens, and I have tons of makeup on. But when I'm driving around in a ponytail, rarely does anyone know who I am. I've never had a drink sent to my table. The fun part is my parents. My mom will call and be like, "Your father's dermatologist and podiatrist want signed headshots of Flo for their walls." So in Stony Point, my headshot is in a lot of doctors' offices – and my parents are very into preventative medicine.

Just the fact that I can breathe easy and not feel like there are wolves at the door has changed everything for me. I'm married and we have a house and we have a kid and the kid is now going to preschool. We can provide for this little guy and be able to breathe. I know that's an incredible thing in this industry. It boggles my mind to this day.

I would love to actually get off my can and write something for myself again. It would be comedy, maybe a sitcom or a web series. I am also active in The Groundlings. I perform a live show every Wednesday night. That has always been my little creative outlet once a week, a part of my brain that needs to escape.

There have been some roles I didn't get that I really wanted. Originally I auditioned for Joan for Mad Men. They said, "You didn't get that, but will you play a switchboard operator instead?" I said, "Sure!" Then I saw Christina Hendricks in that emerald dress, and I went, Oh, I get it now. I also auditioned for Pam for The Office. I didn't get far in that audition, but I was such a fan of the British Office I was just excited to be there. Both of the ladies who got these parts are so perfect. You have to audition for a thousand "no"s so you can get a "yes."

I booked Flo when I was just about to turn 38. I got married at 35. I had my kid at 40. I'm a late bloomer. But it tastes just as sweet when it's late. I definitely was a calmer person getting these things later in life. It allowed me to have a more sane approach to a good job with a good paycheck. In my 20s, I would have spent it all on sweater capes and mid-sized winter boots — and I live in L.A.

Get That Life is a weekly series that reveals how successful, talented, creative women got to where they are now. Check back each Monday for the latest interview.

Follow Heather on Twitter.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io