[Ashton was] the meanest of the mean, but she did it all with a smile so you couldn't really hate her. She was fun. She slept with seven West Point men, one after another, and was in on a plot to assassinate Jefferson Davis. People still come up to me in airports and comment on that, laughing—about the West Pointers, not about trying to kill Davis.
Garber's acting debut was as Allison Linden on the daytime soap opera Texas in 1982. Her first feature film role in the 1984 action film Toy Soldiers.
Garber met her first husband, Screenwriter Chris Hager, when he was working as a grip on the set of North and South: Book II in 1985. She and Hager are the parents of Actress and singer Molly E. Hager (born 1986). That union ended in divorce in 1989. Her second marriage, to Frank Howson (2001–02), also ended in divorce. In 2013, Garber married Director william Roudebush, her former high school drama Teacher.
Garber grew up in Miami, the youngest of three children of a Lawyer father and a cooking-school owner mother. She did some modeling from ages 4 to 13, and always wanted to be a performer. Garber told TV Guide in 1987 that she chose acting over singing because "I was too nervous to sing in front of people—it meant showing more of myself than acting. If you're on stage singing and people don't like it, that's too much rejection." She later moved to New York, where her Casual drug use became what she called "a huge problem". She overcame the addiction before being cast in North and South.
In 2012, Garber appeared as Elizabeth Archer in the series finale of the teen drama web series Miss Behave. She later won a 2013 Indie Soap Award for Best Guest Appearance in a Drama for the performance.
In 2013, Garber played a therapist on the web series Old Dogs & New Tricks (Season 2, Episode 10: "Last Gasps").
