A lot of actors aren’t paid much, and many of them work infrequently. It’s a high-risk profession. Most will never make it big. Anne Heche hung in for a long career, but she was never A-list.
She was a known name and was in several high profile movies and many TV shows since the late 1990s.
Look her up on IMDB.
You can do okay, and not be a big star.. tv commercial actors abs whatnot can build up a decent career over time and residuals but yes the big stars are very very rare. Most like all arts toil in virtual obscurity and the ones making the big bucks are often far from the most capable and talented.
Probably explains their tilt left, hard to accept meritocracy as a concept when your daily life sees little of it
She had a several season role as a police commissier on Chicago PD