AN IMPROVING OUTLOOK

In Ransom Canyon, Minka Kelly enjoys the ride

- ALEXIS SOLOSKI

There were times when Minka Kelly assumed that her acting career was over.

Kelly, 44, had never planned on becoming an actress. Before breaking out in her mid-20s as the sassy cheerleader Lyla Garrity in the football weeper Friday Night Lights, she worked as a scrub nurse. A decade ago, during a slow period, she graduated from culinary school.

So later, when fallow months turned into fallow years, she would tell herself this was fine. If Hollywood had finished with her, she would survive it.

But recently, having published a sensitive, unsparing memoir Tell Me Everything, a New York Times bestseller, Kelly found herself again in demand. An offer came for Ransom Canyon, a Netflix neo-Western series with romance elements. Kelly would fill the cowboy boots of Quinn O'Grady, a concert pianist who runs a dance hall in the Texas Hill Country. Quinn's enthusiasms include soap making, love triangles, looking wistful in prairie skirts.

Kelly didn't think a romantic lead would be available to a woman in her 40s. But it was. And audiences have been enthusiastic: Ransom Canyon, based on the novel by Jodi Thomas, has been one of Netflix's most popular shows since it debuted last week. And there is also more to come. After Kelly finished shooting Ransom Canyon in June, she flew to Paris to film her first romantic comedy Champagne Problems. That movie will debut in November, also on Netflix.

"I've gotten to a place in my life where I am my best, and now the best thing has happened," she said.

This was on a morning in mid-April, and Kelly was seated at the counter of Wick and Pour, a candle-making studio in Manhattan's West Village. (Why candle making? Quinn makes soap. This felt close enough.) Diligently, Kelly poured a lavender and sage candle, then added a spoonful of glitter. "I love using my hands," she said.