In 1985, at age 35, Ann was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a double mastectomy. She battled the disease courageously and successfully.
Her parents fled from Lithuania on bicycles in 1944 during the second
Soviet occupation.
Ann is a three-time Emmy Award nominee and Golden Globe Award-winning actress
(she won the Best Actress Golden Globe for her television movie The Ann Jillian Story (1988) which was the highest-rated television movie of the 1987-1988 season).
In 1990, "Good Housekeeping" magazine named Ann one of the most admired
women of the world.
Future husband (and then-policeman) Andy Murcia pretended to be gay
when he and Ann first met, so she wouldn't think he was just another
man trying to pick her up.
Ann gave birth to her first child, a son, Andrew Joseph Nauseda H.
Murcia, on February 3, 1992.
Continues her work as a motivational speaker, which she
has done for more than 12 years. (January 2003)
Speaks Lithuanian fluently.
Inducted into the Lithuanian American Hall of Fame in 2015.
Ann obtained a scholarship to the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera giving her the chance to study acting and music with some of the finest teachers in the country.
In 1979, she was a huge hit on Broadway in "Sugar Babies" with Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller.