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Along with scores of viewers, Christina Hendricks will always remember the third season of Mad Men as the year when the bombshell bit back.

For three long years, Hendricks's sultry secretary Joan Holloway had endured sexist cracks, office affairs, date rape, crushing career letdown and was even forced by her physician husband to perform an accordion solo for the amusement of his bosses. When Joan's self-serving mate Greg (Sam Page) took to whining about the unfairness of his working life in a recent episode, Joan finally summoned up some pre-Gloria Steinem inner rage and smashed a vase over his head.

“That felt great,” beams Hendricks, in Toronto earlier this week. “Someone told me women were running down the halls of their office the next day, yelling, ‘She bopped him!' And Greg had it a long time coming. He deserved it.”

For all of Joan's hardships, Hendricks remains over the moon to be part of Mad Men . Now down to this season's final episode tomorrow, the period drama set in the early-sixties advertising industry still holds rank as TV's most buzzed-about series. Created by Matthew Weiner, formerly writer-producer with The Sopranos , Mad Men has collected two best-drama Emmys for its first two seasons and reviewers concur that the show boasts some of the best acting on television today – very often citing Hendricks's portrayal of Joan as a prime example.

Christina Hendricks and Geoffrey Arend arrive at the 61st Primetime Emmy Awards held at the Nokia Theatre on September 20, 2009 in Los Angeles.

“It definitely feels like we're doing something unique,” she says. “The show is mature and a little bit dangerous and sexy and it has a beautiful stylish feel to it. Put all those things together and Mad Men really stands out.”

From the beginning, there was Joan. The inaugural season of Mad Men introduced Joan Holloway as the imposing office manager of the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency. “For a working actress, the role of Joan was a gift,” says Hendricks, 34. “Everything came together in this perfect little explosion and I just happened to be there.”

Smart, capable and impossibly curvy, Joan was revealed to have had affairs with at least two of her co-workers, but she still commanded respect among the agency wolves.

“Joan is probably one of the most complex, mysterious characters on the show,” said Weiner at the recent TV critics tour. “On the surface, she's the epitome of early sixties sexiness; at the same time, she's very vulnerable.”

And as the Mad Men story progressed, viewers gradually learned more about Joan in small increments. “Each script in the show's first two seasons revealed a little more about her. It's not very interesting to see someone who's very obvious all the time. You can't just say Joan is bossy, or just say she's vulnerable. That's what makes her so intricate,” says Hendricks.

But life could be unkind to a beautiful woman back in the sexist Mad Men era. In the show's second season, Joan became engaged to the handsome but not terribly intelligent surgeon Greg, the perpetrator of the aforementioned date-rape scene.

Also in the second season, Joan was briefly pressed into fill-in service at the agency as an ad buyer. She performed admirably, but when the job ended, Joan received a curt thanks and was sent packing – but only after she trained her witless male replacement. As women did at the time, Joan hid her disappointment and went back to the steno pool.

“From what I've read, that was how office life was for women back in the sixties,” says Hendricks. “Women did what they were told. You'll never see Joan emote too much. She's smart enough to remain guarded.”

While Joan has suffered, Mad Men has translated into blessings for Hendricks. Before Mad Men , she was limited to supporting roles on the series Kevin Hill and Firefly , and the odd appearance on ER . Last month, she married actor Geoffrey Arend – they are spending their honeymoon in Toronto, where Arend is filming the M. Night Shyamalan feature Devil – and being on a red-hot TV show is already translating into movie work: Hendricks recently finished filming the feature Life as We Know It with Grey's Anatomy's Katherine Heigl, and is fielding film scripts for her Mad Men hiatus.

For now, there is only one hour remaining on Mad Men and it will feel like an eternity before the show returns for its fourth season next summer. Hendricks is bound under strict confidentiality rules to not reveal any details of tomorrow night's final episode.

“But I can tell you that the finale is pretty shocking,” she says, rather coquettishly. “Something happens that absolutely nobody will be expecting. The show is about the ad business, so of course we want people to come back next year.”