A new wrinkle for older actresses
THE AGE THING
Producer David E. Kelley has made a point of showcasing older women in high-profile roles on his many shows; Barbara Hershey is the latest to snag a juicy part.

JOHN ALLEMANG
Television Critic
Wednesday, August 25, 1999

It's a constant complaint in the film and television industry that roles disappear as actresses grow older. But with teenagers and twentysomething teen imitators taking over the U.S. entertainment business as never before, Hollywood's aging females -- now defined as anyone over 30 -- have a lot more to worry about.

If they're smart -- and isn't that one of the benefits of age? -- they'll hitch their career to the busiest man in TV, David E. Kelley.

Kelley, the creator of Ally McBeal, The Practice, Chicago Hope and Picket Fences, has a thing about women who don't fit the mould. Prized by TV networks for his originality, Kelley is at his most innovative in his casting, which has given hope to over-the-hill actresses who can no longer pass as sex-crazed high-school students.

Kelley is married to Michelle Pfeiffer, who is herself 42 and has been heard to fret about the fate of the flickering star. Carrying his home life into his writing, Kelley has made a point of showcasing older women, bringing back actresses into high-profile roles who Hollywood had put out to pasture.

Barbara Hershey, whom Kelley has picked to shake up the cast of Chicago Hope this season, is one of those women. When last seen on network television, the 51-year-old actress who inspired the collagen craze with her lush lips was playing a dying nun whose final wish was to build a chapel in the desert. That's exactly the kind of movie-of-the-week role that TV has traditionally offered to actresses of a certain age: thankless and sexless. Hershey managed to make her character look more telegenic and youthful than you'd expect of an ancient nun, but that's not the point, unless you're a TV executive fixated on the illusion of eternal youth.

Kelley's creative mind is more flexible than the current industry formulas. He has taken Hershey out of the nunnery and placed her in his reworked Chicago Hope, where she'll now play a senior thoracic surgeon who goes toe-to-toe with series troublemaker Mandy Patinkin. You can be sure that Hershey will make full use of her sexual powers, even as she exudes clinical professionalism, because that too is a Kelley trademark.

Many of the older females who survive in TV series have been effectively neutered, turned into sages or shrews who harass and henpeck the young.

But with Kelley, just as the young are neurotically imperfect -- Calista Flockhart's adolescent Ally McBeal being the best example -- the oldies can surprise you with their strength and charm. Dyan Cannon, a 62-year-old with cascading blond ringlets who plays Judge Whipper Cone on Ally, has turned a cameo appearance into one of the most interesting roles on television. She is a smart, no-nonsense judge on the bench, and yet with Kelley's nuanced understanding of older actresses, she also successfully portrayed an indiscreet object of desire for Greg Germann's boyish lawyer Richard Fish.

And this is where the age thing gets a little more complicated. Cannon is acting again, which is good, and portraying a full-blooded, well-rounded character.

But what older woman watching Ally can forget that what Fish found most attractive about Whipper was her wattle -- the loose, limp folds of sagging skin along her neck that neither makeup nor camera angles could hide? What, do you imagine, did Michelle Pfeiffer see in this vision of her future?

Keep in mind that this is Dyan Cannon, a Hollywood version of 62 periodically rejuvenated with all the surgical tricks L.A. doctors can offer. Her age equivalent in the real world is the considerably less soignée Janet Reno, who has also featured as a character on Ally -- more to demonstrate Fish's perversity than to glamorize the U.S. Attorney-General. While Kelley can be saluted for giving work to women most TV executives would consider past it, he clearly sends a mixed message to real-life older women: Only well-preserved overaged starlets need apply.

And while it will be interesting to see Hershey, the once-upon-a-time star of the trampy Boxcar Bertha, essaying the role of a senior thoracic surgeon, it should be pointed out that her role of Dr. Francesca Alberghetti was an afterthought in Kelley's mind. In the crude, cruel business that even the enlightened Kelley is forced to inhabit, the first impulse was to skew Chicago Hope younger in hopes of regaining lost viewership.

But when CBS decided to schedule Hope on Thursdays at 9 p.m. -- opposite such youth-appeal shows as Family Guy, Charmed and Kevin Williamson's new series Wasteland, as well as the more mature market leader Frasier -- Kelley changed his plans. A twentysomething heart surgeon introduced at the end of last season was summarily dismissed, and what started out as a youth movement became the salvation of an older actress.

"We went back to the drawing board," Kelley told TV critics a little indiscreetly, "and really gave that character more thought and decided to come up with an older -- not old -- but older surgeon. And then we went to Barbara Hershey."

"More experienced," shouted Patinkin, trying to help Kelley avoid the pitfalls of ageism. But the damage was done.

GOLDEN OLDIES

TV has never been a safe haven for aging actresses -- although situation comedies have had their fair share of "mature" women in starring roles; from Mary Tyler Moore to Roseanne, Bea Arthur to Candice Bergen. But even in TV dramas, some older women have prevailed against the tide of Hollywood ageism, and done so with gusto. Here's a more or less random selection of some of those exceptions that prove the rule:
Linda Gray, Dallas: Gray played Sue Ellen, the troubled and embittered wife of unscrupulous oil tycoon J. R. Ewing.
Joan Collins and Linda Evans, Dynasty: Collins was Alexis Colby, the vengeful ex-wife of Denver multimillionaire Blake Carrington. Evans played Krystle Carrington, Blake's desperately unhappy current wife.
Angela Lansbury, Murder She Wrote: In this wholesome, long-running series, Lansbury played a nosy mystery writer in tiny Cabot Cove, Maine, a town with the highest per-capita murder rate in the world.
Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless, Cagney & Lacey: An unusual police drama featuring Daly and Gless as a pair of New York police detectives who battled both crime and sexual stereotyping.
Jane Seymour, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: Now canceled, this frontier drama starred the ever-photogenic Seymour as an ahead-of-her-time doctor and feminist in the Old West.
Kim Cattrall, Sex and the City: The 43-year-old Canadian actress (recently celebrated as a "hot woman of a certain age" by Rolling Stone) plays a seductive Manhattan vixen in this steamy new series made for U.S. cable TV. –Staff