Forke attended The Hockaday School, an all-girls private school in Dallas. She also spent a year at North Side Middle School while living in Elkhart, Indiana.

She entered acting with a role in a Texas production of the musical The Rocky Horror Show. After moving to New York City and studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute, she made her feature debut in the 1991 film Brain Twisters (1991). Other roles would include the movies Whispers in the Dark, Heat (1995), and Kate's Addiction (1998), in which she and actress Kari Wuhrer play woman in a lesbian love affair, and the TV-movies Journey to the Center of the Earth (NBC, 1993); Complex of Fear (CBS, 1993); Bionic Ever After? (CBS, 1994), a Bionic Woman movie; and Abandoned and Deceived (ABC, 1995).

She became best known as Alex Lambert, a former U.S. Army Apache helicopter pilot during Operation Desert Storm who afterward ran a Nantucket Island helicopter service for two seasons on the NBC sitcom Wings. The part was a recurring role during the 1992-93 season, and a regular cast role the following year.

After Wings, Forke played Carey, an office manager for a computer software company, in the 1995 CBS sitcom Dweebs (1995), and then, from 1996 to 1997, a prep school teacher in NBC's Mr. Rhodes .