Anne Dudek

Anne Louise Dudek, born March 22, 1975, in Boston, Massachusetts, is an American actress who grew up in Newton, Massachusetts. Her father worked as an architect. She attended Newton North High School before enrolling at Northwestern University, where she began participating in theater productions from the mid-1990s onward.

Dudek made her Broadway debut in 2000 in Wrong Mountain, capping a period of stage work that stretched from her Northwestern years through 2001. Her theater credits also include a production of The Glass Menagerie, for which she received the Connecticut Critics Circle Award for outstanding performance.

Following her stage work, Dudek transitioned to television, first taking a lead role in the British comedy-drama The Book Group, which aired on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. She subsequently accumulated a range of guest appearances on American television series, including Friends, in which she played Precious, Mike Hannigan's girlfriend, and How I Met Your Mother, in which she played Natalie, Ted's Krav Maga-trained ex-girlfriend. Additional guest credits include Desperate Housewives, ER, Charmed, Bones, Numb3rs, Six Feet Under, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and the pilot episode of Psych, in which she played Lucinda Barry.

Dudek took on a recurring role in the HBO series Big Love, portraying a child bride, and later returned to the show as Lura Grant, one of antagonist Alby Grant's wives. She also appeared in the AMC drama Mad Men as Francine Hanson, the next-door neighbor of the Draper family.

One of her most prominent television roles came on House, where she played Dr. Amber Volakis beginning in season four. The character, one of forty physicians competing for a permanent position on Dr. House's team and nicknamed Cutthroat Bitch, was killed off in the two-part season four finale consisting of the episodes House's Head and Wilson's Heart. Dudek subsequently reprised the role as a hallucination experienced by House throughout season five, and appeared again in the series finale, Everybody Dies. In 2010, she joined the cast of Covert Affairs, playing Danielle Brooks. She later recurred on The Flash in 2017 as Tracy Brand.

Her film work includes a role as the daughter of Anthony Hopkins' character in the 2003 film The Human Stain, and the role of cruise line heir Tiffany Wilson in the 2004 comedy White Chicks. In 2012, she appeared in an episode of Touch as an ISS astronaut. Her television guest work continued with a role as villainess Dawn Lin in a 2015 episode of NCIS: New Orleans and an appearance in the fifth-season finale of Rizzoli and Isles that same year.

Dudek married artist Matthew Dana Heller in 2008. The couple had a son born in December 2008 and a daughter born in February 2012, and divorced in 2016.