She built three separate careers after the relationship most people still associate her with.
Apryl Prose runs a Los Angeles company called Your Other Woman, built to help men through divorce. She spent the decade before that in private aviation, working her way up to senior vice president at a charter jet company. Further back, she had a daughter with actor Richard Dean Anderson, his only child, and the two never married.
That last fact is the one most people already know, if they know anything about her at all. It is also nearly the only thing that has ever been written down.
Last month, Prose posted graduation photos to LinkedIn. She had just finished a bachelor’s degree through Harvard’s Extension School, forty-one years after she first started college at the University of Kansas. “A very elite community,” she called it in the caption, “the unemployed with a Harvard degree.”
Table of Contents
The Marriage That Wasn’t, and the Ones That Were
Prose met Anderson in New York in 1996, introduced by a friend who was dating his business partner at the time. He had already built his name on MacGyver and was a few years into Stargate SG-1. He was in his mid-forties. Prose was around thirty. They never married, but their daughter, Wylie Quinn Annarose Anderson, was born on August 2, 1998, and the relationship held together until 2003.
That’s the version of her life that keeps circulating. What rarely comes up is that she’s also been married twice, by her own account. The only public record of a name is a line on her IMDb page, listing a husband called Jim and two children, though it doesn’t make clear whether that’s two children with Jim specifically or two in total, counting Wylie. Even her birth year isn’t settled: several sites list April 2, 1967, though others admit no date has been confirmed, and Google’s own search results currently show the unconfirmed one as fact.
Three Careers, None of Them About Anderson
Prose’s work in Los Angeles started well before any of that, and it barely touched Anderson’s world. Around 1997 and 1998, she worked film sets as David Spade’s assistant, credited on both 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag and Senseless. A 2000 newspaper profile of Anderson, describing her background from that same stretch, mentioned casting work and wardrobe styling as well.
In 1999, she started something of her own: a wedding planning company that ran for twelve years, working mostly with entertainment industry clients and earning coverage in InStyle Weddings twice and in People magazine once. A small onscreen role fit into the middle of that run, in 2007, when she played a waitress in the comedy Chasing Robert.
She left the wedding business in December 2011 for something almost unrelated, joining a private aviation company called Jet Edge International as its director of in-flight services. In March 2014, a little over two years after joining, she was promoted to senior vice president of inflight standards, a title she held for six more years.
Somewhere inside that stretch, in July 2016, she built a second career on top of the first. Your Other Woman handles the parts of a divorce that don’t show up in a settlement: home setup, school paperwork, co-parenting schedules. Prose has written about where the idea came from. “I’ve been a wife twice,” she wrote on the company’s site. “I’ve been a single mom twice, and I’ve been a ‘work wife’ for a handful of people for the past 30 years.” She left Jet Edge in 2020 to run the company full time.
Prose started college at the University of Kansas in 1985 and left two years later without finishing. The degree sat open while she built those three careers, one after another, in three unrelated industries. This spring, through Harvard’s Extension School, she went back and closed it, graduating with honors in psychology.
Her daughter has built a career of her own in the meantime. Wylie Quinn Anderson now works as an actress, writer and director, best known for the 2023 short film How to Cry on Command, which she also wrote and directed.
