In Atlantic City, Kate Shindle sang “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from Funny Girl on her way to becoming Miss America 1998. Someday she might be belting out another song from that musical, “I’m the Greatest Star,” because she has in recent years become one of the most successful performing talents ever to come through the ranks of the Miss America Organization.

A year ago, Shindle stepped into theater history when she played Maggie in the last production of Arthur Miller’s most personal play, After the Fall, before he passed away on Feb. 11 2005. The show, at the Tony Award-winning Alley Theater in Houston, closed just five days before the death of Miller, a titan of 20th-century theater. The genesis of Kate Shindle’s character, Maggie, was Miller’s second wife, movie icon Marilyn Monroe.

“It was quite remarkable,” Shindle said in a telephone interview, three days after the show closed, from San Diego, where she was beginning rehearsals on a new musical. “Arthur Miller’s presence was so strong throughout the production, because it dealt with so many things in his personal life. So much of my performance was based on researching their marriage and really trying to figure out how much of the script was their story.

“The director and I worked very hard to make Maggie her own person,” Kate explained, though the real-life stormy Miller-Monroe union eclipsed the fictional characters in the minds of many audience members.

Next, appearing in Himself and Nora at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, Kate created the role of another famous author’s muse, Nora Barnacle, an uneducated Irish chambermaid who helped one of modern literature’s most celebrated writers, James Joyce, through a myriad of artistic and emotional challenges.

THERE SHE IS: Kate Shindle, appearing with co-star James Black, plays Maggie, a character believed to have been based on Marilyn Monroe, in After the Fall at Houston’s Alley Theatre (top). Kate appears front and center on The Stepford Wives DVD (above), and cuts a striking pose on Hollywood’s red carpet (below.)

“She is a lower-class Irish girl from Galway who was Joyce’s partner and (unwed) mother of his children. I keep getting cast as these women with loose morals,” she laughed, adding, “which is funny because I am the exact opposite of these home wreckers and drug addicts that I play.”

For example, Kate portrayed the floozy Pam in a workshop of the musical version of Urban Cowboy before it went to Broadway. She has also played flamboyant Sally Bowles on Broadway and in the national tour of Cabaret, Louise in Gypsy, and the character The Witch in the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods — all since winning the Miss America title in 1997 at the age of 20.

Following her year of service as Miss America, Kate returned to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and completed her senior year as a musical theater major. Then she hit the streets of Broadway like any young actress armed with a college degree, except that she felt her financial situation was better than that of most “starving artists” because of appearance fees she was able to save from her Miss America journeys. But instead of simply pounding the pavement of New York for auditions, Kate made sure she also was pulling her weight in the restaurant industry, where all good actors go to wait their turn at stardom while waiting on tables.

“Just to keep from being bored, I decided to get a job waiting tables, which I had done at a diner in New Jersey one summer,” said Kate, “but I was afraid if I got a job as an upscale waitress, people would recognize me as a former Miss America.”

But trying to avoid that fate proved futile for Kate, who found a delicatessen opening near her apartment, and went to work there until, one day, The Today Show called her boss and asked him, “Did you know that you have a Miss America working for you?”

After that, “all hell broke loose,” Kate recalled. “It was absolutely insane. Here I had been going out on auditions, but once I’m seen serving hot dogs, I get my big break.” She added, “But life is what it is.”

Within days, NBC had made Kate Shindle an on-air correspondent for Today, and she soon landed an understudy to the actress playing Lucy in the Broadway musical Jekyll & Hyde. Then, one day about a month later — as often happens in the movies but only rarely in real life — the star became ill, and Kate stepped in to make her Broadway debut. Her mother drove into the city from New Jersey to be there, and the critics gave Kate rave reviews.

Her stage kudos have led to opportunity in Hollywood. Kate made her movie debut in 2004 with what she called “a fistful of lines” playing a perfectly coiffed, mysteriously flawless suburban housewife in the comedic remake of Ira Levin’s novel The Stepford Wives. While the movie opened to mixed reviews, Kate benefited greatly from the chance to work alongside Oscar winners Nicole Kidman and Christopher Walken, Tony Award winners Matthew Broderick and Glenn Close, and Emmy Award winner Bette Midler.

“The mornings were brutal,” she said, “but I would love to do more films. Musical theater is what I’m more skilled in, but there are definitely parallels between acting on stage and in films, although film is a different art form.”

“Last year I took a screenwriting class at New York University, courtesy of my Miss America scholarship money. I am also working on a fictional book about a girl who competes in pageants.”

If the perfect movie role does not come along, Shindle might write the script herself. “Last year I took a screenwriting class at New York University, courtesy of my Miss America scholarship money,” she explained. “I am also working on a fictional book about a girl who competes in pageants.”

In terms of performing, she was busy with the San Diego production and was entertaining several offers for 2006. “A lot is going on, and I am very happy about that right now,” she said.