Jayma Suzette Mays (born July 16, 1979) is an American television and film actress, and singer. She is perhaps best known for playing mysophobic guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury on the American television series Glee and for her recurring roles on Ugly Betty as Charlie and on Heroes as Charlie Andrews.
As a young girl, the little red-haired tyke looked much like "Annie," the famous orphan known for her rag-mop curls and choice chutzpah. Jamia Suzette Mays loved "Annie," and she danced like Annie, showing off for her family at home in Grundy, Va. "She knew all the lines," said Jamia's father, James Mays. "She just loved that musical. She sang it and acted it out at home."
Oh, and how she loved to act. "The child wore a different costume every day," said her mother, Paulette Norris Mays. "I did nothing but make costumes for her the first 12 years of her life."
So, being such a firecracker fan of "Annie" and looking so much the part, this little girl must have figured she had a sure-fire stab at the role she seemed born to play when Theatre Bristol scheduled a production. Try as she might, though, little Jamia Mays didn't pass that Bristol audition. And for a while, her family remembered, the rejection was devastating.
'Quirky'
Two decades and a couple of name-spellings later, Jayma Mays might still resemble "Annie." The little red-haired girl from Grundy is now a 5-foot-4 red-haired woman, living among the stars of Hollywood, yet still clinging to her childhood heroes – Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett, a couple of redheads who proved they could be funny.
Just like Mays, 29, who now stars in the box-office hit "Paul Blart: Mall Cop."
"I definitely know that I'm quirky. I know that I'm different," Jayma Mays said during a telephone interview last week. "Red hair definitely made me different growing up."
Redheads also are a rarity among Hollywood's sea of cookie-cutter blondes and brunettes. Perhaps that hair has helped Mays stand out in the past five years, attracting appearances in such television shows as NBC's "Joey," HBO's "Six Feet Under," CBS's "How I Met Your Mother" and ABC's "Ugly Betty."
Then there's her movie career. She co-starred in the box office hit "Red Eye" (2005), showed up as a nurse in Clint Eastwood's war drama "Flags of Our Fathers" (2006) and made moviegoers laugh at her character "Lucy" in the satiric "Epic Movie" (2007).
But don't count on hair color alone. "None of us here at the high school are really surprised at her success," said Debbie Raines, one of Mays' former teachers in Grundy. "She would entertain us while she was here."
