Better Late Than Never

She spent the next few decades in Miami, teaching algebra. "There was a huge hole in my heart, and it haunted me and I had no idea why," she recalls.

A chance encounter provided a clue. After her teaching job came to an end and she had to decide whether to go back to school for a teaching certificate, she went on a scuba vacation and ran into a young couple taking a break from medical school. She told them she had always wanted to go. They asked why she didn't try again.

"I laughed and said that I was too old now," Bach explains. But the couple told her about a 37-year-old ex-fire fighter in their class.

This time when Bach applied to medical school, at the University of Miami, she was told that no one of her age had ever been accepted, and if she were she would have to repeat premed classes and retake the MCATs. She was delighted; gender was no longer an issue.

And this time, Bach was accepted. Her later start had its advantages. Child care was not an issue—her daughter started college the year she started med school. Motherhood had prepared her for the 36-hour shifts of residency tending to the sick. "By the time I became a doctor, I had the experience of losing both my father and my mother, so when my patients were dying, I could relate to the families and help them in their most difficult moments."

Bach now has her own thriving private practice of internal medicine in Miami.

Bruce Sabath

"I'm sick of you bitching and moaning about not being able to get up in the morning and go to work. If you could do anything you wanted with your time, what would you do?" Bruce Sabath's wife, Karen, asked him. For the first time out loud, he said, "Well, I would act." Pause. "But of course I can't do that." Puzzled, his wife asked, "Why not?" Despite a string of excuses, including money and potential rejection, his wife responded, "Well, if that's what you really want to do, why wouldn't you do that?"

Sabath soon quit his position in strategic planning at American Express and enrolled full-time in an acting program. Nine years later, he stars on Broadway in the revival of the musical Company.

"It never occurred to me to pursue acting as a career," says Sabath, who grew up surrounded by people who acted for fun but got "real" jobs in medicine or law. After majoring in applied mathematics and computer science at Harvard, Sabath became a Wall Street whiz kid, taking acting classes "just for fun." "This isn't really it," he felt. He switched to finance. Not it, either. He went to Wharton Business School to do "real business." He still felt something was missing.

One day at American Express, a "superstar" consultant at the Company walked into his office and told him she was quitting her job to pursue her love of painting. "It kind of blew the lid off my whole concept of who can do what," Sabath says.

He attributes his success to his later start. In the acting business, "the weeding out process is fast and unrelenting." By the time he started, at age 35, much of his competition—90 percent of it, he estimates—was gone. The pool of actors with whom he now competes for roles is indeed much smaller—if much better known.

Sabath no longer has any trouble getting up in the morning. And he confides that the major roadblock all along had been his own beliefs about what was possible.

Paul Potts

Paul Potts always liked opera. But as a child growing up just outside Bristol, England, he was frequently bullied because he was different. "I'd been described by some teachers as older than my years with a very mature outlook. I also read widely."

His self-confidence in tatters, singing became his private consolation—maybe too private. "I saw it as something I did for me and for me alone, not as a way of making a living," admits Potts. Besides, all the biographies he had read convinced him that singing professionally required a conservatory education.

At 36, Potts was selling mobile phones by day and stocking shelves at a supermarket by night to pay off bills. He had sung the occasional role in amateur opera productions, saved up money to take some training in Italy, even sung there once for Pavarotti, but a bicycle accident and a series of health crises had left him in debt and offstage.

One night, up late emailing colleagues, he stumbled across a Web site announcing auditions for a new talent show created by Simon Cowell. "I couldn't decide whether to apply or not, due to my age, and not knowing whether I was talented enough or not," says Potts.

In the absence of self-confidence, he called on chance and decided to flip a coin. It came up heads. At first, even his wife didn't know he had entered the competition on Britain's Got Talent.