Actress-turned-singer Rita Wilson came to music late. She didn't release her first album, the 2012 covers collection “AM/FM,” until she was 55, and she didn't write her first song until a few years after that.

Wilson had always assumed that songwriting was something other people did. She didn't have the nerve to write her own songs until she met Kara DioGuardi, the famed songwriter (Carrie Underwood's “Undo It,” Kelly Clarkson's “I Do Not Hook Up”), former “American Idol” judge and all-purpose celebrity friend.

“I'm so thankful to her,” Wilson says in a phone interview. “She really was the person who said, ‘I think you can do this. I think you have something to say.'?”

Wilson and DioGuardi wound up writing two songs together with co-writer Jason Reeves, both of which wound up on Wilson's new, self-titled album. “I think that she put the right elements together so that I would feel comfortable and have a good experience, so I'd want to do it some more,” Wilson says. “If it'd been a horrible experience, I'd say, ‘OK, that's not going to happen anymore.' Without her taking me by the hand and saying, ‘You can do this,' I don't think I would've had the guts to approach other people about songwriting.”

Wilson co-wrote every song on the album with a rotating team of writers that included artists-turned-pros like Richard Marx, ex-Semisonic leader Dan Wilson and Sugarland's Kristian Bush. She has been famous for almost 30 years, as an actress (in movies and TV shows ranging from “Sleepless in Seattle” to “Girls”) and as the wife of Tom Hanks.

Most actors who launch belated music careers will tell you, truthfully or not, that they are returning to their first love, that they began life as musicians who were forced to reluctantly abandon music once their acting careers took off. Wilson doesn't say this. Born in Los Angeles and raised on the Laurel Canyon folk of the '60s and '70s, she was a fan, not a participant. “I always loved music, but acting took precedence.”

Wilson played Roxie Hart in a 2006 Broadway revival of “Chicago,” which inspired the birth of “AM/FM,” an album of classic country, lite rock and pop covers. But making “Rita Wilson” has made Rita Wilson a songwriter, and songwriting has changed everything. Performing her own material live was daunting, she says.

“When you're an actor, you're playing a character and all that fun stuff that goes along with it, and it's great,” she says. “But when you're writing your own music and performing it, there's no hiding behind a character. There's something about being completely terrified but being in the moment, there's something about that connection (with) the audience that makes it feel very satisfying.”

Allison Stewart is a freelancer.