The movie “The Hunger Games” will sparkle Jennifer Lawrence career, but her career started long ago before she ever started.

Her career in acting started on a farm in Kentucky, she convinced her mother to take her from their horse farm in Kentucky to New York so that she could audition and meet agents. She auditioned for Twilight, but did not work out.   She got smaller roles with big-name actors. Parts containing a TV movie Company Town and an episode of Monk in 2006, episodes of Cold Case and Medium in 2007 and 2008 — and eventually, her efforts earned her a spot on the TBS Sitcom The Bill Engvall Show, in which she played the comedian’s teenage daughter, Lauren Pearson. That series ran for three seasons, 30 episodes overall, and launched her star. I used to watch this show. It was the only show that would watch during the summer months on TBS.

In Under the Radar Magazine, Jennifer Lawrence said “The Bill Engvall Show, I’m so grateful for it,” she said, “ I had so much fun on that show, and we all became like family. It funded my indie career, so I could do the movies that I want.”

Engvall knew from the star that she’d be a star.

“Of my favorite scenes that I did on that show, one of them was with Jennifer. I go back and watch it every once in a while,” he told Kentucky’s MetroMix last year. “We had a scene where she was mad at me and I had to go in and apologize to her. We had that nice dad-daughter moment. I remember (thinking), ‘This girl’s good.’ She’s got it; she’s got what it takes. I think she’ll be holding that statuette before she’s done.”

While still working on Engvall, Lawrence landed her first film lead, in 2008’s The Poker House, as a teenager growing up in a troubled household in poor, 1970s Iowa. She won Best Performance at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

“I was young. I hadn’t done anything else and so everything that I read I wanted to do,” she said about the film in a 2009 interview. “But now that I’m older and actually have a point of view and I can see what an amazing, brilliant script it is and how it grabs you and it has teeth and it’s real and it’s ugly and all the things that aren’t usually appealing really appeal to me.”

She starred in another lauded domestic drama that year, “The Burning Plain”, playing a troubled teenager who accidentally murders her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, then moves toMexico. Charlize Theron played the older version of her character.Lawrence won the Marcello Mastroianni award for emerging actors at the Venice Film Festival.

The prizes, of course, would only get bigger. She wowed in her role in Winter’s Bone, playing Ree Dolly, a tough-as-nails teenager fighting for survival in the mountain towns ofWest Virginia. It was a harrowing role and an impressive lead for someone that was just 19-years-old when it shot. It was a small independent movie, but its rise at Sundance – and it got her an Oscar nomination. She was on the road to stardom.

Her next movie that put her on the map was X-Men: First Class, as blue mutant Mystique. When I watch this movie on the big screen I did not recognize her from the start, but her character was a young superhero and the movie was great.

And so here she is, she is set to star in what could be a record box office draw, already amassing millions of new fans — but some have known about her for years. And I am a fan of hers.

The Hunger Games is now playing world wide tonight, please check your listing for time and date. Come early to get a sneak preview of Twilight: Breaking Dawn 2 and stay to watch the movie.