Smart's Roundabout Return to TV

You might say Jean Smart is still a Designing Woman.

From 1986 to 1991, she was Charlene in the TV series Designing Women - tall, ditsy Charlene, a naive Southern-fried chick who picked out swatches, wallpaper, paint and drapes in an interior-design shop. All the while, she kept up long, hilarious, often rambling conversations with some equally nutty co-workers about life and love in Atlanta.

So has she been a designing woman for the last several months - but not on TV. Smart has been onstage in the Roundabout Theater's revival of 1939's The Man Who Came to Dinner, whose title character breaks his leg in front of an elegant home in the Midwest, then proceeds to turn the house upside down with his constant demands.

On Saturday night - the next-to-last performance of the show - she'll be on TV and onstage at the same time. The Man Who Came to Dinner will be broadcast as the first installment of the PBS series Stage on Screen, featuring live performances of classic and modern theater pieces.

In the show, Smart plays a larger-than-life actress (based on the late Gertrude Lawrence) with designs on a dim, stuffy, stuttering British lord who's apparently only just bright enough to escape her clutches.

She shares the stage with two master scene-stealers, Nathan Lane and Lewis J. Stadlen, but she's tall enough and imposing enough to hold her own.

Quietly funny and slightly reserved, the tall, blond actress has a booming laugh and says she loves hearing others laugh, too - a particular benefit of doing theatrical comedy.Smart came to New York this time around to audition as a replacement for Bernadette Peters in Annie Get Your Gun, but when Christine Baranski dropped out of The Man Who Came to Dinner, Smart picked up the role like a fumbled football.

Acting first attracted her while she was growing up in Seattle, and when she entered the University of Washington, she headed for the Fine Arts department. Then she worked summers in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival - "theater in the rain," as she calls it.

"I came to New York in 1980 and was in an Off-Broadway play, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, as an intellectual lesbian," Smart recalls. She won a Drama-Logue Award, which got her noticed - and she moved to Broadway to play Marlene Dietrich in 1982's Piaf.

That got her a ticket to the West Coast, where for the next three years she worked in sitcoms and films until Designing Women hit it big. Smart hit it big in another way, too - it's where she met husband, actor Richard Gilliland; they have a son, 11.

"I gave up Designing Women after five years because it was too long doing the same thing," she says. "You become an actor because you don't want to do the same thing all the time, like you had a 9-to-5 job. TV is very lucrative, but I've spent too long in the theater to say I was an actress for the money."

She's an actress, all right. Anyone seeing her turn on Frasier this year as the high school beauty-turned-Dracula would likely agree - as did Emmy voters, who awarded her a statuette for the role.

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