FELICITY HUFFMAN hated the myth of the perfect mother.

“She should go the way of the dinosaur, extinct,” Huffman wrote in exasperation a few years ago on her blog, where she agonized about losing her cool with her children and not being an easygoing mother — and where she also sold mugs bearing cutesy quotes like “I Can’t Adult Today” and “Good Enough Mom.”

Yet Huffman, 56, was competitive and driven. Maybe no one could be a perfect mother, but she could still try to be a great one. She joined parents’ committees, threw elaborate Halloween parties using top of the line studio props and, with her husband, William H. Macy, leveraged her celebrity to support the prestigious Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, where Sophia, the elder of their two daughters, studied theater and thrived.

Huffman, an Emmy winner for “Desperate Housewives,” and Macy, an Oscar nominee for “Fargo,” taught acting workshops at the school, hosted fundraising galas, and donated at least US$20,000 to its foundation, while fellow parents basked in their proximity to such a beloved Hollywood pair.

They are not quite as beloved anymore. Huffman was led out of her Hollywood Hills home by FBI agents March 12, accused of making a US$15,000 payoff so a crooked test proctor could tinker with Sophia’s SAT answers. Her arrest came as part of a broad investigation of a cheating and bribery scheme that involved 50 people and has fueled a national debate about fairness in college admissions.

Huffman has admitted to the guilt and said in a statement Monday that she accepted full responsibility for her actions and would accept the consequences.

“I am ashamed of the pain I have caused my daughter, my family, my friends, my colleagues and the educational community,” Huffman said. “I want to apologize to them and, especially, I want to apologize to the students who work hard every day to get into college, and to their parents who make tremendous sacrifices to support their children and do so honestly.”

The actress also said that her daughter “knew absolutely nothing” about her deal with Singer and that she “betrayed” her child.

“This transgression toward her and the public, I will carry for the rest of my life,” Huffman said.

The FBI probe exposed a network of wealthy parents who allegedly paid the scheme’s organizer, William Rick Singer, millions of dollars to boost their children’s chances of getting into selective colleges and universities such as Yale University, Georgetown University and Stanford University.

Huffman and Singer arranged to have her daughter take the SAT at a center where one of Singer’s proctors would oversee the test and change the answers. Huffman’s daughter, who had also been granted extra time to complete the exam, got a 400-point increase in her score, according to an affidavit.

The actress then “donated” US$15,000 to the Key Worldwide Foundation, a nonprofit organization Singer started in 2012 and which was purported to be a charity.

Singer pleaded guilty last month to charges of racketeering conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of justice.

Huffman agreed to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and honest services mail fraud, according to federal prosecutors.

The maximum sentence for those charges is 20 years in prison and three years of supervised release and fines.

Huffman may serve a maximum of 10 months, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office intends to argue for a US$20,000 fine, a year of supervised release, and a restitution amount set by the judge, according to a plea agreement filed with the court.

Friends and fellow parents at Sophia’s school lamented the fact that Huffman has become one of the few public faces of the scandal, even though her case involves a relatively small sum compared with what others are accused of spending; one father is said to have made US$1.2 million in payoffs.

The theater producer Frederick Zollo, who worked with Huffman and Macy on plays years ago, said that while payoffs were “obviously a very stupid thing,” Huffman had already been punished enough. “I think the public humiliation is more than sufficient,” he said.

The playwright David Mamet, the couple’s friend and collaborator of many decades, sprang to their defense in an open letter urging people to hate the game of corrupt college admissions rather than hate these players, whose parental instincts were understandable.

But some who knew the couple in the past saw hypocrisy in Huffman and Macy’s actions and in the friends who protectively stood by them. “People shield people of power; nobody wants to speak truth to power because they might need them,” said Theo Cohan Feldman, who, along with Huffman, Macy and Mamet, was among the founding members of the Atlantic Theater Co. in New York. Feldman rejected the notion that this might have been a mere mistake. The couple, she said, had always been very smart and very deliberate.

“I don’t think that has changed with fame and success,” Feldman said. “They took a calculated risk.”

Huffman met Macy in New York in the early 1980s when he was leading acting workshops with Mamet and she was a theater student at New York University.

Huffman came from privilege: Her maternal grandfather helped found Morgan Stanley, and her father was a partner there. She was the youngest of eight, and joked that her mother named her Flicka — officially it was Felicity — because she had run out of names.

When Huffman was 7, the family moved from Bedford, a New York City suburb, to Little Woody Creek, Colorado, and into a white clapboard house that sat on 27 acres (11 hectare), where six of the sisters, including Felicity, would later get married.

In an interview with the Television Academy, Huffman said she vividly recalled first meeting Macy, with his sweep of blond hair and Lacoste shirt; per the fashion of the time, he had flipped the collar up. He was 12 years her senior — and married — and Huffman found him funny, cool and smart. “Like a god,” she said. The pair eventually began dating and, after years of being on and off, married in 1997.

Among their theater friends in New York, they were deeply admired. “She and Bill are such caring people, intelligent people,” said Bradley White, an actor who knew them.

She was also known for being unafraid to be forthright, sometimes to the point of harshness, a trait of which she was evidently aware. One friend recalled visiting the couple’s home in the Outpost Estates neighborhood of the Hollywood Hills and spotting a largish sign in Huffman’s office. “Be nice,” it read.

By the time Sophia was born, in 2000, Macy had hits like “Fargo,” Boogie Nights” and “Air Force One,” behind him, and Huffman had starred in Aaron Sorkin’s acclaimed television show “Sports Night.” Her star continued to rise after their second daughter, Georgia, was born in 2002.

Huffman landed a starring role in “Desperate Housewives” and received an Oscar nomination for her lead role in the 2005 film “Transamerica.” In 2012, when “Desperate Housewives” ended and a year after Macy’s show “Shameless” began, she started her blog, and named it “What the Flicka.”

It was pulled offline a few days after her arrest. But before it vanished, it was a gold mine for anyone seeking inconsistencies between the actions Huffman is charged with and the version of parenting she espoused on the blog, where she touted the importance of honesty, confronting fears and reading books like “The Blessing of a B Minus,” which cautions against micromanaging the lives of children.

Huffman used the blog to deploy you-go-girl affirmations and confessionals. “If our kids are alive and decent citizens at 18, we all deserve a medal,” she wrote at one point, punctuating the thought with an expletive before “medal.” In another post, she wrote, “I have made so many mistakes as a parent it actually makes me nauseous to think about it.”

She also seemed painfully aware of her privilege and ability to disconnect from troubling world events, wondering, in a 2014 post, how she could stomach shopping at Target given the massive garbage patches in the oceans, or blithely prepare for her daughter’s slumber party when hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls had been kidnapped by Boko Haram.

The High School for the Arts, where Sophia is a senior, is tuition-free and highly selective, and its 600 students must audition to get in. Though the school is public, a well-connected foundation helps bridge the nearly US$1 million annual gap between taxpayer funding and the arts program’s operating costs.

Even against this high-octane backdrop, Sophia, who is 18, stood out. She won awards and accolades and frequently landed leading roles in dramatic productions, including the part of Mary Jane in a one-act Spider-Man play in January.

It is unclear if Sophia knew anything about her SAT answers getting fixed.

(SD-Agencies)