How they got their start: Ally Walker

Image: The Everett Collection

On Profiler, Ally Walker plays Dr. Samantha Waters, the forensic psychologist who becomes the star of the FBI's Violent Crimes Task Force due to her innate sense of the criminal mind. The character has an eerie gift, able to shift her perspective to literally see from the eyes of the worst offenders. This made her the most impressive profiler on TV in 1996, and to make it even more eerie, Profiler added in a serial killer who Dr. Waters is not only tracking - but he's also tracking her.

This added so many chills to the block of crime shows that Profiler originally lived in that the series eventually crossed over, with Walker's character guest starring in another TV world on multiple episodes of The Pretender.

Profiler was the third series that attempted to cast Ally Walker as an officer of the law. First was True Blue in 1989, where the actress played the partner of that series' star, serving in an Emergency Services Unit as one of the very first folks on the crime scene. Next was Moon Over Miami in 1993, where she again was partnered up with the series lead, this time Crime Story's Billy Campbell. In that one, she plays a victim who approaches a private investigator about a case, only to quickly become his partner through a series of quick twists. Both series only lasted a season, but they were enough to shake off Walker's past as a damsel in distress on a certain soap opera the whole world watched in the late 1980s.

Walker got her start as an actress on Santa Barbara, a riveting soap opera with a murder mystery at its center. It was so popular, it ran for more than 2,000 episodes. Walker was featured in 94, playing a character named Andrea Bedford, the girlfriend of the eternally jealous and occasionally violent Cain Garver. On the show, Walker was a knockout, of course, but she was a beauty with brains, and for fans of Profiler, it may amuse you to know that it was her faulty confidence in her criminal detection skills that eventually got her killed off the show.

In the last episode Walker featured on Santa Barbara, she attends a costume party dressed as Helen of Troy. She's there to make her already always jealous boyfriend Cain even more jealous, but she also suspects he might be the killer that everybody's on the lookout for at the party. Eventually, she dumps the hunk and goes for a sulky walk on the beach, and that's where a masked man takes her down, and not the one she had her suspicions about.

Thankfully for Walker, later on in her career, her instincts for detecting criminals got much more impressive.