Smart Moves
By: Valerie Kuklenski
Jean Smart hasn't had a TV show to call her own in three years, but she's kept very busy leaving memorable impressions on the viewers of other stars' series. Take Frasier on NBC, for instance, and her Emmy-winning portrayal last season of Lorna Gardner, Frasier's unrequited high school crush who reappears in his life to fulfill some of his wildest fantasies and worst nightmares. For Kelsey Grammer's Frasier, the divorced Lorna was sexy and still coquettish some 20 years after she last romped and rah-rahed on the sidelines of their school football field. But toward others -- her kids on the phone, a total stranger in an elevator -- she was positively shrewish. "My husband (actor Richard Gilliland) said, 'I don't think it's funny -- I live with that!' " Smart said with a laugh. It was written as a one-shot role, the characters' relationship effectively over with their mutual admissions that they were using each other. But executive producers David Angell, Peter Casey and David Lee apparently still had a crush on Lorna themselves, so Smart has returned to the Paramount set this month to shoot four more episodes expected to air in May. Meanwhile, over at CBS' freshman drama The District, Smart is coming back as the ex-wife of police Chief Jack Mannion (Craig T. Nelson). Last fall Sherry Regan popped back into Mannion's life to tell him she was engaged. Tonight at 10 is the wedding the lovelorn Mannion is bent on stopping, a la Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate. Last summer, Smart wowed New York theatergoers in the limited-run Broadway revival of the 1939 Pulitzer-winning comedy The Man Who Came to Dinner with Nathan Lane as the cantankerous Sheridan Whiteside. Smart wafted across the stage as one of his friends, gold-digging starlet Lorraine Sheldon. It was yet another occasion for the 49-year-old statuesque, curvaceous blond actress to make men's jaws drop even as they're laughing with appreciation at her exquisite comedic timing. Asked what she thought about playing three such voluptuous dames in their 40s, Smart replied, "I was pretending they were in their 30s," and euphemistically characterized them as "no longer ingenues." "I'm having a ball. How could I not?" she said. "I get to vamp it up and camp it up. And what's nice, too, about The District is that character is so down to earth. She's an ex-cop and she's a redhead. How could I say no to playing a redhead who packs a gun?" While CBS is mum on the outcome of tonight's wedding episode, Smart will film another one in March for airing later in the season. In many ways, guest-starring sounds good: dash in, join up with some of the best casts in series TV, take a pencil-sketched character with a few zinger lines and give her some personality, then move on to the next one. And the gaps between jobs give her the freedom to spend time at home in Encino with Gilliland and their 11-year-old son, Connor. But there are down sides, too. The money and the security aren't there like they were during her 1986-91 stint on the sitcom Designing Women, in which she played the naive, good-natured office manager, Charlene Frazier. Since then she's starred in two witty sitcoms, neither of which lasted. In 1995, High Society had Smart and Mary McDonnell as a pair of lushy, lusty friends in a pond-jumping, Americanized version of the British hit comedy Absolutely Fabulous. That show, Smart says in hindsight, was "probably a bit much for the network, at least at the time." In 1998, she was back in the midseason sitcom Style & Substance, in which Smart brought to life every nasty rumor ever circulated about Martha Stewart. "That one broke my heart," she said of its abrupt cancellation after just a few airings. "I'm sort of interested in doing another series," she said. And apparently, despite those last two disappointments, she's leaning toward situation comedy, for the easy schedule as much as the laughter. "The problem is, I love working on these one-camera (drama series) shows, but the hours I find prohibitive, having a fifth-grader," she said. "For instance, the other day when I was working on The District -- which is just a blast, I love working on that show -- I got up and left before my son woke up and I got home after he was in bed. "And I thought, man, how do people do this? How do moms do that nine to 10 months of the year?" |