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Anne Pressly's lively personality made her a hit with television viewers across Little Rock, Arkansas and, with a small, uncredited role in director Oliver Stone's new film W., she hoped her career was finally on the move.
Now she is fighting for her life after she was found viciously beaten in her home.
Detectives do not know whether it was a robbery gone wrong or whether she was attacked because of her high-profile job or her budding celebrity status.
The 26-year-old anchorwoman is in a critical but stable condition. On Sunday night, she went to a surprise birthday party for a fellow anchor at Little Rock's KATV, Channel 7.
By 9.51pm, she was updating her Facebook page back at her apartment in a safe neighbourhood, a few blocks from the country club. She wrote: "Anne is so thankful for the wonderful friends who came to see my little 30-sec part in W."
Next morning, when she did not answer a wake-up call, her mother went to the apartment and found her daughter battered and bloodied.
It was half an hour before she was due on the set of Daybreak, the morning mix of news, features and traffic reports. Ms Pressly was lying in her bed, unresponsive and bleeding from her "severe wounds" to her head.
She had been stabbed and had severe injuries from blunt-force trauma to the head and upper body. The anchorwoman's purse was also missing, and police speculated that she was beaten during a robbery, although there was no sign of forced entry into her home.
Mallory Hardin, a colleague at the TV station, said she had dinner with Ms Pressly on Sunday night then went to see W. with other friends. She and Ms Pressly exchanged text messages about the film afterwards but nothing had seemed out of the ordinary.
Her friend had sent her a "bubbly, wonderful text", Ms Hardin told NBC's Today show.
"If there's one person that doesn't have an enemy, it is Anne Pressly. She's wonderful to everybody. She's the most loving girl anyone could ever meet," Ms Hardin said.
Before her appearance in W, she had a small role as a sorority girl on the daytime soap opera As The World Turns.
Stone's new movie opened in the US last weekend and the anchorwoman won her small role after travelling to Shreveport, Louisiana where much of it was filmed for a story on the region's film industry.
The casting director noticed her and cast her as a conservative commentator who speaks highly of Mr Bush's "Mission accomplished" speech aboard an aircraft carrier after the fall of Saddam.
Before that the anchorwoman's highest achievement was a saccharine interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney when he was hunting in Arkansas.
Returning from a story, Ms Presley found the road blocked at Mack's Prairie Wings, in the town of Stuttgart. Mr Cheney, who had shot one of his friends in the face while quail-hunting, agreed to the interview on the spot.
It was conducted amid boxes of ammunition, shotguns and duck decoys.
- THE INDEPENDENT