Felicity Huffman wasn't supposed to win the Emmy over her more glamorous and talked-about Desperate Housewives costars. But she did. Now, she's an Academy Award favorite for her performance in Transamerica - in which she plays a man prepping for sex-reassignment surgery.

Not bad for an actress who was thinking a few years ago that maybe she wasn't supposed to have a Hollywood career, after all.

Through the few ups and many downs in her professional life, Huffman often thought about quitting, pulling into her driveway and crying with her head on the steering wheel after bad days and failed auditions.

She managed to fleetingly catch the eye of audiences with bit parts in The Spanish Prisoner and Magnolia, and she endeared herself to a cult of fans who caught her as the slightly flighty producer on the acclaimed but short-lived TV series Sports Night.

To those who wondered why Huffman did not steadily rise to bigger and better parts, the answer is easy.

"No one offered them to me," Huffman, 43, said over a salad at a cafe near the home she and her husband, actor William H. Macy, share with their two daughters in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley.

Huffman's two breakthroughs came almost simultaneously. After reluctantly meeting with ABC about yet another TV project she figured would go nowhere, she was cast as the overwhelmed homemaker Lynette in Desperate Housewives.

As she was doing an early cast reading of the show's pilot script, Huffman got a call from her agent that she had gotten the part of Bree in Transamerica, playing a transsexual whose final surgery to become a woman hits a snag after she learns of a teenage son, a cynical street hustler (Kevin Zegers), she never knew she fathered.

The character, who began life as a male named Stanley, is a definite "she" to Huffman, though Bree still has the manly plumbing.

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