This is Annaleigh Ashford’s moment — and it’s been 25 years in the making.

The Denver-born star of the CBS sit-com “B Positive” and Tony Award-winning actor made her stage debut in 1994 as a pint-sized, profane, murderously ambitious (but cute as a button!) 9-year-old diva in “Ruthless: The Musical.” Ashford shocked and awed audiences of Theatre Group, then Denver’s preeminent gay-friendly theater company, which instantly adopted her into its tribe.

“We all walked together in the Denver Pride Parade when I was 9 years old,” Ashford said last week, just after wrapping the second season of “B Positive.” “It was sort of foreshadowing the rest of my life.”

Ashford plays Gina, a train-wreck of a party girl with a heart – and kidney – of gold. In the first season, Gina volunteered to donate her booze-soaked organ to a former high-school acquaintance (Thomas Middleditch) before Season 2 brought one of the biggest overhauls in sit-com history. After inheriting a surprise fortune, Gina bought an assisted-living facility and dedicated her life to helping the senior residents played by an astonishing array of “Legends with a Capital L,” as Ashford calls them, including Linda Lavin, Hector Elizondo, Jane Seymour, Ben Vereen, Jim Beaver and Anna Maria Horsford.

Ashford is nothing like little Tina. Or Betty, the ex-prostitute she played on “Masters of Sex.” Or Jeanie, the pregnant flower child from “Hair.” Or Maureen, the bisexual performance artist from “Rent.” Or, most recently, Paula Jones, the Arkansas housewife whose lawsuit contributed to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Or the woman she plays next in the limited Hulu series “Immigrant”: Irene Banerjee, half of the couple that founded the male exotic-dancer empire Chippendales.

There is a reason Ashford has been called “The Good Girl of Tony Town.”

No, if ever a role ever matched its portrayer, it’s the ever-being-positive Ashford and Gina (Season 2!). “Gina is the closest character to me that I have ever gotten to play,” Ashford said. (Although she did also play Glinda the good witch in “Wicked” on Broadway. And she shares a few undeniable commonalities with the exuberant lab/poodle mix she played opposite Matthew Broderick in “Sylvia.”) “Gina really wants to make the day light and bright and joyful for people, and that’s something I strive for in my life, too.”

To the casual observer, Ashford’s trajectory has been a rocket ship to the stars. She graduated from Wheat Ridge High School at age 16, and from Marymount Manhattan College at 19. The week she turned 21 in 2006, she found out she would be making her Broadway debut as a sorority girl in “Legally Blonde.” She was nominated for a Tony Award for “Kinky Boots” in 2013, and she won theater’s top prize in 2015 playing the whimsical dancer Essie in “You Can’t Take It with You” opposite James Earl Jones. She married actor Joe Tapper in 2013 and is the mother of her 5-year-old Instagram star, Jack. Last month, Ashford was one of four emerging stars singled out in Entertainment Weekly’s annual “Breaking Big” issue.

But what’s often overlooked in rocket-ship stories like hers are the pit stops for fuel along the way. Like when, a few months after starring in “Wicked,” Ashford was back to babysitting to pay the bills. “I was having a hard time getting a job, and it’s really expensive to move in New York City,” she said. “So I babysat … a lot. I even babysat on my night off while I was performing in the off-Broadway revival of ‘Rent.’ ”

When it comes to perspective, Ashford has 20/20 vision.

“This life is full of really big heartbreaks and losses – and they never stop,” said Ashford. “I would encourage people to look at those of us who have careers in the arts like contractors. That means we don’t have a consistent income from year to year. And that makes things really challenging and complicated as an adult with a family. I will tell you that when you do get a good job as an actor – you are always paying back bills from when you didn’t have a job.”

Wheat Ridge beginnings

Ashford, born in 1985 to Holli and Chris Swanson, enrolled in famed Denver cabaret singer Kit Andrée’s dance academy the same day she started the second grade. She did not have a traditional teen pop-culture experience, she admits. “In high school, when everyone else was listening to Eminem, I was listening to ‘Donna Summer Live’ for four months straight,” she said with a laugh.

One of her teachers at Wheat Ridge High School says a freshman Ashford showed grace under pressure even when she wasn’t on the stage. “One day, all of the power went out at school while she was in her Honors English class,” Melissa Marilyn Hadden said of Ashford, then just a  freshman. “I found her leading a class sing-a-long of Disney tunes. We passed the time as Jasmine, Ariel and Belle.”

Ashford frequently performed as a teen at the Littleton Town Hall Arts Center and the former Country Dinner Playhouse, including one remarkable run of “The Sound of Music” that had future stars Ashford, Melissa Benoist and Jesse JP Johnson all playing Von Trapp siblings. Benoist, of course, flew to fame playing TV’s “Supergirl” and has since become a superhero in domestic violence awareness after sharing her experiences with intimate partner violence. The two met taking classes as children under Paul Dwyer and Alann Worley at the former Academy of Theater Arts in Arapahoe County.

“I actually just ran into Melissa in the park yesterday,” Ashford said. “We hadn’t seen each other in years, and yet here we were at the same park, at the same time, with our husbands and our sons. It was very magical and kismet and so sweet. I had this lovely reflection about how proud I am of her talent and her grace navigating how to be a role model. She was certainly thrust into the spotlight in a very specific way, and she has handled it beautifully.”

Steve Tangedal, who starred opposite Ashford in that campy 1994 production of “Ruthless,” says Ashford showed the potential to be a star even then. “She is a born comedian,” he said. “She knew how to work the audience even when she was 9 years old. She had the audience eating out of the palm of her hand.” Ashford’s last local role before leaving for college was starring as Sandy in “Grease” at the Country Dinner Playhouse. As the theater critic at The Denver Post at the time, I called her “nothing short of a star-bound phenom.”

Since then, Ashford has become known as something of an acting chameleon, especially given her recent work as a nearly unrecognizable Paula Jones in Ryan Murphy’s limited series,  “Impeachment: American Crime Story.”

“The thing about ‘Impeachment’ is that Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp and Paula Jones didn’t really have agency over the telling of their story at the time,” she said. “Most of their story was dominated by the media coverage of their story.

“Before I started doing my research into Paula Jones, my only connection to her was through late-night talk shows, which were horrific in the way they treated her about how she looked and sounded. I was struck by her simple need to please her husband, and then her spokesperson, Susan Carpenter-McMillan. It was important for me, and I think for the show as a whole, that we share with the audience each of these women’s narratives in a way that hadn’t been told before.”

Meanwhile, “Be Positive,” airing Thursdays, is being watched by an average of 4.5 million viewers a week. For Season 2, the title sequence, written by Keb’ Mo and series creator Chuck Lorre, was reconceived to highlight Ashford’s singing and dancing prowess. She says one of the great blessings of the show is that it has brought 84-year-old Linda Lavin (she starred in the sitcom “Alice”) and other older TV greats back into American living rooms.

“Linda Lavin is one of my idols, and now she’s one of my friends,” Ashford said. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t take a beat to reflect on the breadth of her work as an artist. So, the fact that I get to spend all this time with her has been such a gift to my life.” Joining the elder gang for the final few episodes of the season will be Rondi Reed, a stage superstar who originated the role of Mattie Fae Aiken in “August: Osage County.” She and Ashford performed together for a year in the Chicago production of “Wicked.”

“It’s just an extraordinary cast, not only for the breadth of talent but the breadth of good humans in the room,” Ashford said. “We have really created a family over this last season.”

Whenever talking about her successes, Ashford is quick to credit God, her mother and the Colorado theater community. She was raised in a Baptist church in Lakewood that partly remains the foundation of her faith. “But as I’ve grown and aged, I feel like my view on a higher power has just opened up like a flower,” said Ashford, who now considers herself to be “a very liberal” Christian.

“I never could have navigated such a challenging life path – one that’s really hard on your heart and your soul – without something to lean on,” she said. “And to me, that’s my belief that God is watching over me. I really, truly believe that God loves everybody in every shape and form that they come in. And that means God doesn’t care who you marry, because God made you, and God loves you. To me, God is exactly what Lin-Manuel Miranda said so beautifully a few days after the Orlando shootings: “Love is love is love is love.”

Ashford’s message back to her teachers and friends in Colorado is a simple thank you “for making me a better artist and a better human than I ever could’ve been alone,” she said.

Ashford is eager to get back to Broadway when the time is right and her schedule allows. But first, she’s starring in two more upcoming films. “Smart Blonde” is a biopic about the Oscar-winning actor Judy Holliday, who fought back against sexual harassment and was eventually blacklisted in Hollywood as a communist. In “American Reject,” she plays a singing hopeful who falls into the depressing afterlife of reality TV fame.

No matter how dark she goes with her characters, Ashford will be happy as a clam if she’s forever associated with the sunshine that Gina continues to bring into American homes.

“You know, it’s a real test of endurance, strength and character to really have a positive and joyful life,” said Ashford, who feels a two-fold responsibility to give back for her blessings. “As an artist, I can give back by telling stories that make people’s minds a little more open, and a little more loving, and that help people see the world in a brighter light. And what I can give back as a human being is always making sure that I am the best role model and teacher that I can be for my son and for the people in my life – and that means teaching my son that love is love is love is love. And that he can be whatever he wants to be in the world, as long as his intention is to make it better.”

And what might 9-year-old Annaleigh think of the 25-year trajectory her life has taken?

“I think 9-year-old Annaleigh would be so grateful, number one, to be doing what she always dreamed that she’d get to do,” Ashford said. “And number two, I think 9-year-old Annaleigh would be so relieved that she’s gotten to continue to work with so many fabulous drag queens.”