KEY POINTS:
Eva LaRue had all but given up on her acting career when fate intervened, landing her a dream job on CSI: Miami.
The former beauty queen, who plays trainee crime scene investigator Natalia Boa Vista, left the soap opera All My Children in 2005, and resigned herself to not acting again.
"There's a season here in Los Angeles called pilot season, from January to March," she says. "It's when all the hopeful, new wannabe series are shooting their pilots.
"Actors come from all over the place and deposit themselves in LA for three months and try to book a new series for the following year."
After an unsuccessful pilot season, which LaRue describes as "hellish", the actress thought she had come to the end of the road.
"I felt like I'd been dragged behind a bus," she recalled.
She was planning a permanent move from New York to Los Angeles, to be closer to her family, when she received a phone call from her manager.
LaRue had auditioned for CSI: Miami earlier in the season, and the producers liked what they saw. They wanted her to come in for a producers' meeting and audition the next day.
The show was due to start shooting the next week, and it was the final audition before they cast the role.
But LaRue was due in New York to move house that day, and it was an engagement she couldn't break.
"I thought, 'Oh well that sucks'. Obviously it just wasn't meant to be."
But she was wrong.
LaRue arrived in New York to learn that the producers hadn't found anyone at the audition.
They asked her to go to the CBS Studios in New York and audition on tape.
Despite initial reservations - she was convinced they wouldn't cast her off-tape - she filmed the scene.
"The casting director let me do it five times, I screwed it up that badly.
"On the fifth time, I finally got it right," LaRue laughed.
The tape was couriered to LA on Friday and the producers watched it during the weekend. On Monday it was shown to the executives, and on Tuesday LaRue was cast.
"It was the most unbelievable thing," she said.
"It just fortified my theory - when it's not yours, it's not yours. It doesn't matter if you're sleeping with the director and the producer is your father - if it's not meant to be, it's not. But when it is, all heaven and Earth moves."
LaRue describes her role on CSI: Miami as the best thing that has happened to her - after her daughter, Kaya.
The Puerto Rican actress is proud to play such a smart, feisty character.
"When I started out in the business, the roles I got were the maid, the nanny or the hooker.
"It was tough in the beginning for Latin women to get anything other than that, so it was great when All My Children gave me my first really big break and then I came out of that and now I'm a scientist."
LaRue admits the show has its frustrations, particularly the tongue-twisting technical dialogue, but says the whole cast struggles with that so she is not alone.
She also has to deal with shielding her five-year-old daughter from the programme's more graphic scenes.
"One time I was screening a show and she came running downstairs - she was supposed to be in bed - right at the moment [Jonathan] Togo got shot in the eye with a nail gun.
"I had to take her to the set the next day so she could see it was just pretend and Togo was fine."
But for all these things, it's the best job LaRue has ever had.
"It's awesome. It's like going to Disneyland."
On screen
* Who: Eva LaRue, who plays Natalia Boa Vista
* What: CSI: Miami
* When & where: Double episode, Sunday, 8.30pm, TV3
