With her attractively forthright manner and her trademark voluminous, teased brunette hair, McEntire not only won many music industry awards and produced an impressive string of best-selling albums, but also made music videos and a great many TV variety and award show appearances. As with other country music stars, media visibility and the experience of putting over storytelling songs suggested the possibility of straight acting, and McEntire made her feature debut in the highly enjoyable revamp of 50s monster films, "Tremors" (1990). She has subsequently performed smoothly as the extravagant Texan mother candidate in "North" (1994) and in TV-movies such as "The Man from Left Field" (1993), opposite Burt Reynolds and as Annie Oakley in "Buffalo Girls" (CBS, 1995). The latter proved a nice warm-up for her 2001 Broadway debut as Annie Oakley in the hit revival of Irving Berlin's "Annie Get Your Gun.” McEntire received glowing notices not only for her beautifully singing but also for her deft comic timing and chemistry with leading man Brent Barrett.
McEntire began concentrating more television than film in the late-1990s, starring in several made-for-TV movies, including “Forever Love” (CBS, 1998) in which she played a loving wife and mother who slips into a stroke-induced coma only to awake twenty years later and try to assimilate herself back into the lives of her loves ones. In “Secrets of Giving” (CBS, 1999), she was a widow in 1905 struggling to keep her farm and few head of cattle while caring for her ailing 5-year-old son (Devon Alan). But a lone stranger (Thomas Ian Griffith) arrives out of the blue to help, making a deal with the town’s banker that puts his own future in jeopardy, but brightens the Christmas season for everyone else. McEntire then got her own sitcom, “Reba” (WB, 2001- ), playing a Texas soccer mom whose idyllic suburban life is rapidly falling apart around her after her husband leaves her for another woman and her teenaged daughter gets pregnant. Despite a previously crazed schedule of recording, touring and hosting “The Country Music Awards,” McEntire found it a blessing to have a regular schedule in which to live a normal family life. The show itself became a rare hit for the perpetually struggling WB, taking in a consistent 3 million viewers a week, as McEntire earned kudos with a nomination for a 2003 Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series – Musical or Comedy.