As she makes her return to Broadway in the revival of Edward Albee's "Three Tall Women" alongside Laurie Metcalf and Glenda Jackson, actor Alison Pill reflects on how theater and the availability of complex roles on the stage have consistently had a profound impact on her acting career. In fact, if it wasn't for the early roles she found on stage backed by women, Pill says, perhaps she wouldn't have went on to build the robust Hollywood career she now has, including major credits in films like "Milk" and "Miss Sloane" and in shows like "The Newsroom" and "American Horror Story: Cult."

"I feel like theater saved me," Pill said on "Salon Talks." "When I moved to New York, I started doing theater seriously, because the roles that existed gave me a completely different thing to measure other roles against. I was working with astonishingly talented people, and had an expectation that the female roles should be complicated, fleshed out and not sexual objects."