The actress, who won two Emmy awards as nurse Colleen McMurphy on television's China Beach, has just completed a successful stage run in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Dinner with Friends and currently is producing and starring in a series of movies. But she already has achieved both of her early benchmarks—"Jeopardy" and The New York Times crossword. "So my life is made," she chuckles.

In a career that has spanned more than two decades since graduation from Wesleyan University in 1978, Delany has achieved success on stage, screen and television. Working as a producer for the first time on a series of movies for ABC-TV, she recently has been in Canada shooting Final Jeopardy, based on a novel by Linda Fairstein, head of the Manhattan district attorney's sex-crimes unit. "There is a market for women in television," Delany says. "A lot of the time you have to create opportunities."

She began her career in New York, acting on the stage at night and taking roles on the daytime soap operas "As the World Turns" and "Love of Life" to support herself. "When I graduated, you weren't supposed to do television," she says. "You were supposed to go do theatre, get your training there. But that's all changed. Now people don't even go to college. They go right to Los Angeles and get on a TV show. I don't know if that's so good, personally. I think it's better to develop a technique so you can act in any situation."

Delany landed guest roles on some of television's most popular shows, playing Tom Selleck's fiancee on "Magnum, PI" and Bruce Willis' ex-girlfriend on "Moonlighting." In 1988, she was offered the lead role on "China Beach," a drama about the women who served in Vietnam. Winning Emmy awards in 1989 and 1992, Delany told one interviewer she was so spoiled by this part it would be difficult to go back and play "the wife."

Yet it was a wife's role that brought her back to the stage and Boston this fall. Dinner with Friends, by Donald Margulies, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is a rueful comedy about two 40-something couples whose relationship is fractured when one announces divorce. This serious comedy-drama analyzes the two couples, their friendship and how they must deal with divorce individually and as a group.

"There is a tradition of great female roles in the theatre," says Delany, who starred at PA as Nellie Forbush in South Pacific. Her theatrical career has included Translations and A Life on Broadway and Bloodmoon and Dinner with Friends in New York and Los Angeles.

"I'm glad at my age that I am going back to the theatre, because I think there is more diversity and depth in the roles," she says. "You could say these women in Dinner with Friends are wives, but there's so much more going on than that. You're sort of peeling back the layers of the onion until you get to the kernel of truth at the center." Delany loves performing in Boston. "I find Boston audiences are so appreciative, and the old theatres are just wonderful. They have such a sense of history to them," she says. In the Wilbur Theatre, where Dinner with Friends played, Marlon Brando did A Streetcar Named Desire and Jason Robards performed in Long Day's Journey into Night.

Delany feels technology, such as floor microphones, has caused theatrical acting to change over the years. "Acting is not so presentational any more. I think it is hard for modern actors to remember you have to allow the audience in," she says. "I'm a little guilty of hiding a bit on stage."

Off stage, she enjoyed walking around Boston without being recognized or treated like a celebrity. "I'm pretty anonymous in Boston," she says. "I wear glasses and a hat, but it's not to conceal myself. I think I look pretty normal when I'm not on stage."

She didn't get a chance to visit the Andover campus during the three-week Boston run of Dinner with Friends in November. However, she says she definitely would give students the same advice she imparted when she was artist-in-residence on campus in May 1997: "Remember life is an adventure; believe in yourself; make your own money; and search for meaning in your life."

Attending PA for only the 1973-74 school year, Delany was a member of the first coed class. "It was one of those serendipitous mixes of people," she says. "We're still all very close. In fact, I've been to every reunion."

"Andover kind of spoils you, because the world is not so supportive," she continues. "I just feel if you decided you wanted to do something at Andover, you could do it. They'd find a way for you to be able to accomplish it."

She emphasizes non sibi—not for self—was ingrained in her class, and she's noticed it in classmates 25 years later. "There's a great sense of giving back to the community, feeling responsible for other people and never taking what you were given for granted," she says.

Through the years, Delany has been active in a number of charitable, community and political causes. Currently she is on the board of the Scleroderma Research Foundation, an involvement that grew out of watching the sister of a close friend die of this chronic, autoimmune disease of the connective tissue.

"I'm also involved peripherally in politics," she says. "I'm very active with abortion rights."

Since she donated the Dana Delany Dressing Room in George Washington Hall, aspiring actors see her name as they perform in academy productions. But Delany does not think of herself as a role model. "Maybe Jack Lemmon ’43 is a role model," she says. "All I know is I had a great time. I loved doing theatre at Andover."