Jane Krakowski knew she'd found fame when she got evicted.

The 55-year-old actress had tried to hold onto her rent-controlled apartment in New York City for the first year after she was cast as Elaine Vassal in 'Ally McBeal' - which ran from 1997 to 2002 - because she didn't know how successful the show would be, but she was eventually ordered to leave as her landlords were aware she was living elsewhere.

Speaking to Jesse Tyler Ferguson on his 'Dinner's on Me' podcast, she said: "I remember the first time I came back to the East Coast after Ally McBeal aired because my parents were still here. I'm very close to my family, and I would come back on hiatuses and go see everything I could on Broadway too, you know, see everybody.

"I literally got evicted because I was on Hollywood Field. I had, like, a rent-stabilised apartment on the Upper West Side.

"I tried to keep it the whole first year, and as 'Ally McBeal' got more and more known, I got, like, a certified letter from my landlord's lawyer saying, 'We know you don't live here. We know you're not living here. You need to evict the premises.' And I was like, 'What? How could this even happen?' "

The former '30 Rock' star ended up having to give up the property and stay with her parents when she was in New York.

Jane recalled how she and her co-stars felt "a little shaky" when they watched the pilot episode of 'Ally McBeal' - in which Calista Flockhart played the titular lawyer alongside the likes of Gil Bellows, Lisa Niole Carson and Greg Germann - because they knew it had the makings of something big.

She recalled: "There was a little bit of trust of what we were, you know, getting into, but it was so funny and so original and so different. I have such a clear memory of the first screening that we watched the pilot.

"And I think because we all had no idea what we were making or what it really was gonna be. I mean, we knew we all loved the script.

"And I remember sitting with all my other castmates, and we all just kinda looked at each other, and I felt like a little shaky inside because I think we knew it was something so different that it might really change our lives."