Ann Jillian was born January 29 1950, although many sources say 1951 is her birth year.^[1][2] She was born to Roman Catholic Lithuanian immigrant parents and speaks Lithuanian fluently.

Jillian has been acting since 1960 when she played Little Bo Peep in the Disney film Babes In Toyland. She appeared as Dainty June in the Rosalind Russell-Natalie Wood 1962 movie version of Gypsy. She had several television appearances in the 1960s and 1970s, notably becoming a regular on the 1960s sitcom Hazel and appearing in The Twilight Zone episode "Mute" as the mute telepathic Ilse Nielson in 1963. She also did voice acting, for Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! and Sealab 2020 in the early 1970s, but—told she was too tall to play youthful roles of the day and too young to play a leading lady—there was no more work for her in Hollywood. She took a department store job and studied psychology, but heeded the advice of casting director Hoyt Bowers and Walt Disney who had told her, "whatever you do, keep working at your craft."^[3]

Jillian married Andy Murcia, a Chicago police sergeant, in 1977 and shortly thereafter Murcia retired to manage his wife's career. Earlier in her career she had been managed by Joyce Selznick.

In the late 1970s she toured in musical comedies including Sammy Cahn's Words and Music. She was picked from that production to appear in the original company of Sugar Babies on Broadway with Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller in 1979.