(CBS News)-- The Help made an overnight star of Octavia Spencer, after 15 years as an actor.
She s already won the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe Awards for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Minny Jackson, a sassy maid who agrees to help Emma Stone s character with a book about the treatment of African-American housekeepers in 1960s Mississippi.
After 15 years of small roles in films like Being John Malkovich, Coach Carter, The Soloist and Dinner for Schmucks, and appearances on such TV series as The Chronicle, LAX, Ugly Betty and The Big Bang Theory, Spencer is on her way to the Oscars as an Academy Award nominee.
On CBS This Morning she told Gayle King that the response she has received over the film feels like a dream: I feel like at some point somebody will come up and say, You can wake up now.
When asked how she feels about being part of a film that has met with such acclaim after producers struggled to get it before the cameras, Spencer replied, I feel like it is definitely an homage to the men and women who came before us, and I just love that they, THEY - because Viola [Davis] and I are playing the characters of these women - I feel like they are being embraced more so than she and I. And I love it. I love that we are a part of that.
Spencer also admitted that she suffers severe stage fright. I don t know what it is. It s only when I have to, well, talk in front of thousands of people, she said.
She said she gets over it once she gets out on stage, but the anticipation of walking out just is - you re like, Oh, my God, I got to remember what I m supposed to do!
Spencer also offered whom she is pulling for at this weekend s Grammy Awards: Unfortunately, my girls are all in the same category - Katy Perry, Adele, and Rihanna. So I m pulling for each one to win a couple of things, and that way we re all happy!
