Emmy-winning "Rockford Files" star James Garner is coming back to the small screen this fall in a recurring role on "Chicago Hope." According to Variety, Garner will join the series for the last four episodes of the year, as a strong-willed multimillionaire who takes over the hospital.

Garner, who also lends his voice to NBC's midseason animated show "God, the Devil and Bob," may join the show next fall if it is picked up for a seventh season. He has not starred in a regular series since NBC's "Bret Maverick" in 1981.

"Hope" producers also announced that Alan Rosenberg ("L.A. Law") will join the show as a regular, after several appearances this season as the hospital attorney.

The David E. Kelley drama has rebounded this season after sliding in recent years, and has moved to a new night, and revamped the cast, including the return of Mandy Patinkin.

Arkin angry at 'Hope' creator Kelley

Adam Arkin, who stars on CBS' "Chicago Hope," tells TV Guide that he is livid with creator David E. Kelley. Arkin's statements refer to the way Kelley unceremoniously dumped six of the show's cast members at the end of last season. Kelley axed Christine Lahti, Vondie Curtis Hall, Jayne Brook, Stacy Edwards, Eric Stoltz and Peter Berg with no warning whatsoever. "It was a huge surprise. It was an unsettling and strange way to end the season," said Arkin. "There was never anything done in less than a professional way." Arkin was one of only a few regulars, including Mark Harmon, Hector Elizondo, Lauren Holly and Carla Gugino, who were kept on the show for its new season. "It'll only be a matter of time before they hire some pretty young actors and put us all out to pasture," Arkin added.

Operating On A New Night

TV’s No. 2 medical drama begins its fourth season on a new night. With this move, CBS seems willing to gamble with Hope’s success, but the characters on this episode are loath to take chances. First, a rich cardiac patient (Tom Skerritt) doesn’t want to wait his turn for a transplant and decides to "buy" a new heart; and Shutt (Adam Arkin) doesn’t want to perform a chancy brain operation, even thought the patient (Michael Zelnicker) and his primary physician, Jack McNeil (Mark Harmon), are anxious to roll the dice. Meanwhile, a shooting in the ER gives Wilkes a new perspective on life, and there’s a development in Grad and Kronk’s off-again, on-again engagement. (1:00)

taken from TV Guide page 170, October 1, 1997

Smart And Smarter

Lauren Holly, who recently filed for divorce from rubber-faced actor Jim Carrey after 10 months of marriage, says that she prefers not to stretch the norm offscreen. "I Hope they don’t hate me for saying this, but a lot of actors like to create this persona that’s offbeat," says Holly, 33, who costars with Greg Kinnear in the new romantic comedy A Smile Like Yours. "I don’t know if I could ever do that. People say to me that I’m too normal to be in show business." In fact, Holly, a Sarah Lawrence graduate, was a bookworm as a kid. "Doing well in school was a big thing in my house," says Holly, whose parents are both college professors. "When I was preparing for the SATs, I had to learn a new word every time I came to dinner." So much so that Holly once planned to put her vocabulary to the test as a lawyer. "I make great arguments," she says. "Just ask anyone I’ve dated."

taken from People Weekly page 136. 9/1/97

Between The Sheets

Linda Fiorentino, the smoky-voiced siren of The Last Seduction, gives another uninhibited performance as a seductive psychologist in Jade, the new romantic thriller. "It’s false bravado," says Fiorentino, 35, of playing a sexually charged predator. "If I walk on a set and I’m inhibited, I wouldn’t be able to do my work." Chazz Palminteri, who plays her jealous attorney husband, never let on that their sex scene in Jade was his first. "I would have been more gentle if I had known he was a virginn!" says Fiorentino, laughing. But Peter Berg, her Last Seduction lover, did admit to being uncomfortable onscreen. "He was so nervous," she says. "Usually it’s the actress ggoing ‘Oh, I can’t do this! My dad’s going to kill me!’ And here was this man going, ‘Oh, my wife’s going to kill me! The role reversal offscreen made the scene work ‘cause I knew how terrified he was."

taken from People Weekly 1/6/95

Hector Elizondo

"It was in Stand Up and Be Counted, a comedy about women’s issues. The first day on the set was a bedroom scene, an Stella Stevens and I were supposed to be nude, but of course we weren’t, and I was very shy. I was relatively new to movies, and Stella had been around the block. I was supposed to be on top of the lady, and I’m thinking, Good Lord, how am I going to….? And I couldn’t, and I didn’t, and she picked up on it right away. She took, pardon the expression, the bull by the horns and just said, ‘C’mere," and yanked me down and took off her top in a New York minute. I thought, This ain’t so bad. And then I realized no one cared – they were just doing their work, chewing their gum, looking the other way.
about his first love scene

Still Pretty

"It’s like old home week," says Hector Elizondo of reuniting with the Pretty Woman team of Richard Gere, Julia Roberts, and director Garry Marshall for Runaway Bride, the romantic comedy they’re currently filming. The Chicago Hope actor, who played Robert’s hotel-managing fairy godfather in 1990’s Pretty Woman, now plays Gere’s best friend. "I’m somewhat of a matchmaker since I instigate the two getting together," reports Elizondo, 61. "So again I’m a little bit of connective tissue. Except for one difference: My hairpiece is thinner. That’s the good thing about being bald – you can change your look."
taken from "People" magazine 12/14/98. Page 192.

Vondie Curtis-Hall
"It was in high school. With the most beautiful woman in the school, and for some reason, I think she thought I was someone else when I got the date on the phone. It was short and sort of like the one in Modern Romance, when Albert Brooks picks up his date and they go around the block and then he says, ‘I can’t do this.’" When asked what his most memorable date. From InStyle Magazine, February 1998. Page 166.

Peter Berg
Age: 34
Why Him?: The Chicago Hope star's feature directorial debut, Very Bad Things, about a bachelor party gone bad, is so unapologetically twisted it makes David Lynch look like Mary Poppins by comparison.
Work Habits: With the motto "death before boredom," this former pizza-delivery boy writes freehand ("It's more visceral experiece to feel ink flowing out of my body"> in a distraction-free environment in small New York City hotel rooms. "I write between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m., when I can access aspects of my brain that become unavailable as the day's trials and tribulations knock me into submission."
Next?: Coping with reaction to Very Bad Things. "I'm already getting 'What is wrong with you?' and "Who's your therapist?'" says Berg, who is also working on a script about a New York City fireman who attempts a heist. "This is going to be a lot meaner, bigger, and faster."
from "Entertainment Weekly" June 26/July 3 1998. page 82

Christine Lahti
Christine Lahti. Best Director, Short Film (Live Action) Lieberman in Love, 1995
"At first, I put my Oscar in my office, but my husband [director Thomas Schlamme] said, 'No, put this one in the front room by the piano,' It's filled with light and music there. I always imagined that if I won an Oscar it would be for acting, not directing, and I do walk by it sometimes and pretend it's for my body of work as an actress. But hey, I'll take one for anything. I brought it to the set of Chicago Hope one day, and a lot of the crew had their pictures taken with it and made their own acceptance speeches. Otherwise it stays where it is. Sometimes there are candles around it, but they're never lit so it's not like a shrine. It was a bigger deal when I was nominated [for best supporting actress] for Swing Shift [in 1984]. I wasn't married then, I didn't have kids, my work was my whole life. Now it's truly just a piece of my life. When Ryan O'Neal read my nomination for Swing Shift, my legs were asleep, and if I had one I would have had to crawl up to the stage. That would have been like being caught in the ladies room, like I was at this year's Golden Globes."
from "InStyle" magazine

Peter Berg
"In prep school I was teased because I didn't know the right words to Grateful Dead songs and I didn't know how to take a bong hit without coughing. I'd let smoke out, which would float around the dorm rooms and teachers could smell it. I eventually taught myself how to take massive bong hits without coughing till the pointwhere I could smoke huge monster hits. I also eventually learned every Dead song by heart. Then I really started hating pot and later gave it up. I still like the Dead, though."
from "MovieLive

Peter Berg
"I got beat up more doing sex scenes with Linda Fiorentino"
on ‘Great White Hype’ co-star and sparring partner Damon Wayons
from "US" December 1995 page 132

Peter Berg
"It’s finding the truth within yourself. And then accessing that truth."
when asked ‘What is creativity’
from Entertainment Weekly issue unknown, page 82

Mark Harmon
"In a harbinger of his role to come, the soon-to-be Chicago Hope star pulled a 16-year-old boy from a jeep that crashed and ignited near the actor’s Brentwood, Calif., home last January. Using a sledgehammer to extricate the boy, Harmon threw his own body on top of him to put out the flames engulfing the teens legs.
from ‘Entertainment Weekly" 1996 year-end special. Pg 72

Amie Carey
Sometimes all it takes is one foot in the door. For actress Amie Carey, it was a head of full wild hair. "It was definitely the hair, boldness of my purple," says the New Jersey native, about landing her role on CBS’s Chicago Hope as the funky and flirtatious nurse Maricela Keith.

It was only last year that Carey, 20, was spotted playing one of the angst-riddled characters in the University of Southern California’s stage production of Eric Bogosian’s "SubUrbia." With no previous on-camera experience, the newcomer was cast in the recently released film adaptation, and her part on Chicago Hope soon followed. "[The producers] said to me, ‘Just be yourself,’" she says. But it isn’t just her hairstyle (recently changed from bouncy braids to a short, copper-toned coif with blond streaks) or her pierced eyebrow that’s attracting notice in the halls of the hospital. Her character’s crush on the much older (and romantically weary) Dr. Aaron Shutt (Adam Arkin) has begun to generate heat.

"The writers have talked to me about maybe going out on a date with him, kind of like playing up the whole age-difference thing," she says. "Because his character is so frigid and uptight, it would be really fun to see him let loose."

written by Ty Holland
from TV Guide March 29, 1997 page 11.

Chicago Hope short
Singing cops bombed- just ask Steven Bochco- but nobody’s tried singing docs. Until now. Hope is staging as all-musical episode choreographed by Dirty Dancing’s Kenny Ortega. (Which means that yes, Mandy Patinkin will be back for a crooning cameo.) On more serious notes, Hope will deal with male rape and pedophilia, and Dr. Shutt (Adam Arkin) will be stricked with an aneuryism. As for Christine Lahti’s Dr. Austin, "she’s going to do heroic things," the actress says. "She’s got her daughter back. She’s got rid of that ex-husband. She’s over the death of her father." Who knows? Maybe she’ll even make it through an entire episode without weeping.
from ‘Entertainment Weekly’ issue unknown 1997 page 81.

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