Jean Smart Talks “Harry’s Law”: MyFoxLA.com

So when Smart — best known for her roles on ”Designing Women,” ”Frasier,” ”24,” the new ”Hawaii 5-0,” and ”Samantha Who?” — was offered the recurring role of district attorney Roseanna Remick on Kelley’s latest series ”Harry’s Law,” which stars Oscar-winning actress Kathy Bates as lawyer Harry Korn, she jumped at the chance.

”I always wanted to speak his words. I was ecstatic about (this role),” said Smart. ”I’m the district attorney you love to hate. She’s so outrageously ruthless in a way that’s almost kind of funny. She will obviously say and do just about anything to win, which is fascinating. She’s the Richard III of modern district attorneys.”

According to Smart, she didn’t have to do any research for this role.

”David used to be a lawyer; he’s done all the research for me,” said Smart, who is married to actor Richard Gilliland.

Together, they have two children: Connor, 21, and Bonnie, 3, who was adopted from China in 2009.

Smart pointed out that on television the lawyers people root for and sympathize with are the defense attorneys, whereas in real life people root for the prosecutors and think defense attorneys are ”scumbugs.”

”Roseanna would say, ‘I don’t understand this. I’m trying to put away the bad guys. What’s the deal here?’ Obviously, she does it in very unethical ways occasionally. She does have a rather twisted sense of humor, which I adore. She says to Harry at one point, ‘I find it interesting that you’ve defended all these murderers and drug-dealers, and you save all of your disdain for me.’ I think that’s how she sees it,” explained Smart. ”For whatever those reasons, I think she feels like she’s on some kind of a crusade. She’s enjoying it. She also sees it as a game — it’s a big game. Her attitude is a bit like athletes’ attitudes are in a way — you trash talk, you go out there and try to break each other’s knees, then you go out and have a beer together.”

She continued, ”Harry doesn’t quite see it (Roseanna’s) way; she’s a little bit purer. Kathy’s character is an anti-hero in the sense that she’s such a curmudgeon, she smokes dope, and she isn’t always sympathetic — which I think is fantastic for a lead character on a show like this — but along comes Roseanna Remick (who) makes Harry look nicer. That’s fun to have. I love the scene where they sat down in bar and had a drink together — that was fun.”

In addition to working with Kelley, Smart also enjoys teaming up with Bates.

”Who doesn’t love Kathy Bates? I’ve always admired her so much; we have mutual friends from the New York theater community. I’m crazy about her. I think she’s fabulous and she has been unbelievably kind and supportive of me,” Smart said. ”Every few days, I’d hug her and kiss her and tell her, ‘This is from so-and-so’ or ‘So-and-so says hi.’ We have a one degree of separation kind of relationship. We both starred in theater, so we have similar sensibilities about work.”

The actress earned critical praise and an Emmy nomination for her portrayal of mentally unstable First Lady Martha Logan on the fifth season of ”24.” Her last appearance as Martha was in the sixth season when she stabbed her estranged husband, the evil President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin). Although Martha’s current whereabouts and activities after that incident were never revealed, subsequent episodes have hinted that things did not end well for her. Smart has her own theory about her character’s fate.

”They made it sound like she jumped out a window or something,” she said, laughing. ”I half-jokingly picture her with a shaved head in a rubber room somewhere, babbling in Russian. Who knows? Poor Martha.”

What wasn’t ambiguous was the fate of Smart’s recurring character, Gov. Pat Jameson, on the first season finale of the new ”Hawaii 5-0.”

”I went down in a mini-hail of bullets. I say that because it was two to three bullets,” said Smart, who really enjoyed the role. ”You get to play the governor of Hawaii, you get to shoot in Hawaii, you get to be part of a remake of a classic TV show. I thought how fun could that be?”

Earlier this year, Smart jumped at the chance to portray Camilla, the Duchess of Cornwall, and wife of Prince Charles in the tele-film, ”William & Catherine: A Royal Romance,” which chronicled the courtship of Prince William and Kate Middleton – now the Duchess of Cambridge – who were married earlier this year.

”I just couldn’t say no. It was just one of those things that sounded like so much fun,” she said. ”I was nervous because there is almost no video footage of her speaking. I Googled and YouTubed until I was blue in the face. My husband found an audiotape of her addressing a group of journalists. That helped me get down the quality of her voice — she has a very posh accent and a very deep voice.”

She continued, ”I thought it was great fun. When I heard that Jane Alexander and Victor Garber were starring, I knew it would have wonderful acting in it. I read the script and thought it was really enchanted. I totally got sucked in by the love story — it doesn’t matter how much of it was fictionalized — I found myself rooting for this young couple… It made me cry and I just loved it.”

Asked if she heard from the real Camilla, Smart laughed and responded, ”I doubt if she watched it. I’m sure their reaction was: ‘Oh, please, another movie about this family? Really? Okay, fine, thank you.”’

Smart enjoyed filming ”Youth in Revolt” in Michigan in 2009. She and her son drove through downtown Detroit and dined at the restaurant Coach Insignia, which is located on top of the Renaissance Center. The actress sang Motown’s praises.

”Even though parts are depressed, you see those spectacularly beautiful old homes and cathedrals — some of which, unfortunately, are boarded up. When you get downtown, you see parts of the city that have been revitalized. There was a street fair down on the water,” recalled Smart. ”You can see driving through the city — even the parts past their heyday a little bit — you can see why Detroit has been called the Paris of the Midwest. You can see it — the architecture is breathtaking.”

She continued, ”We ate at one of the best restaurants I have ever eaten — bar none — in my entire life. The food, the view, the service was phenomenal. It was amazing… Detroit has always been an incredible city: the history, the things Detroit gave to our culture. I wish Detroit the best.”
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“I would have loved to talk to Camilla,” says Jean Smart, who plays the former Camilla Parker-Bowles – now officially known as the duchess of Cornwall – in the television movie William & Catherine: A Royal Romance. “But the movie is not about her and Charles.” The movie, which recounts the circumstances leading to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton this past April, is scheduled to air on the Hallmark Channel on August 27.

“From what I could glean,” the 61-year old Smart says, “Camilla seems like she has a great sense of humour.

She’s an outdoorsy kind of person and maybe not entirely comfortable in the limelight. It was difficult to find interviewswith her. I think she’s a little camera shy. She was a little beat up by the media and the British public for a while.” Is she an admirer of the duchess? “As an actor I have to go with the person in the script,” Smart says, “and I liked that person very much. This film treats Camilla very sympathetically.” “Despite everything that happened, (she and Prince Charles) obviously loved each other for 40 years,” Smart says. “No matter how you feel about everything else, you’ve got to root for the fact that they’ve stuck it out and put up with a lot of abuse. Not that they didn’t make mistakes,perhaps,but they decided, ‘This is who we are and this is what we want. We’re happy, and please be happy for us.”’ Smart, who completed the film earlier this year, is speaking by telephone from the set of the NBC series Harry’s Law.She will appear with series star Kathy Bates in this season’s first three episodes, and her role may become a recurring character.

In the course of her three-decade career, Smart has moved effortlessly from sweet to madcap to tough to villainous.

Audiences may first have noticed her as naive office manager Charlene Frazier Stillfield on Designing Women (1986- 1991) or as the female serial killer in Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story (1992). Fans of 24’’ (2006-2007) will recogniseher as semi-nutty Martha Logan, the wife of the nefarious President Logan (Gregory Itzin).

While filming William & Catherine: A Royal Romance, Smart had only one concern.“ I hope Camilla didn’t mind my playing her,” she says. “But we’re not seeing her in situations where she has to deal with painful things.” Princess Diana (Lesley Harcourt) is seen only in flashback. Instead the film focuses on Prince William’s college years, when he met his bride-to-be at St Andrew’s University.

“It helped a lot that William sort of accepted Camilla,” says writer/producer/ director Linda Yellen, who also wrote and produced The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (1982) and met with Princess Diana three times, in a separate interview.

“I think maybe the tragedy between Charles and Diana was that they thought they could marry and each would make the other into something else,” Yellen says.

“It was never going to work.” It’s tricky, of course, to make a movie about currently living people that recounts recent events that happened in the absence of movie cameras.

The film is not about the relationship between Charles and Camilla, but inevitably that relationship is a part of the story.

Yellen has a generally favourable view of the often-controversialCamilla.

“She is a maligned person in the press,” the filmmaker says. ‘But if you watch her progression since she’s been back with Charles, recognising her place next to him, she also has gotten more conventionally styled and attractive, although she doesn’t care about those things.

Although Smart insists that she has never paid especial attention to the British royal family, she understands that such is not the case with many of her compatriots.

“Americans have a little bit of royalty envy,” the actress says. “We all want people to look up to, as much as we tear them down.” Smart, who has been married to actor Richard Gilliland for 24 years, has a son, Connor 21 and her daughter Bonnie is 3. Smart and Gilliland adopted her in 2009.

“We’d been talking about adopting for years and years,” Smart said. “We put off the paperwork, but finally decided to do it. It was worth the wait. It’s been a wonderful experience. Every weekend I take my little girl to garage sales. I’m training her early. I give her a dollar, and she picks out a little stuffed animal.”

Smart made such films as The Brady Bunch Movie (1995), Snow Day (2000), Sweet Home Alabama (2002) and Garden State (2004) while raising her son, but she spent much of those years working in television.

“Sitcoms have the best schedule,” she says. “You’re home every night.” It didn’t hurt that she was good at them, earning two Emmy Awards as Outstanding Guest Actress in a Comedy Series for Frasier(2000-2001) and a third as Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for Samantha Who? (2008).

“Dramas like Harry’s Law are 12-hour days,” Smart says. “But, if you’re not the star of the show you don’t work every day.

You can still have a life.” “Theatre is the hardest,” she adds.

“You’re not home at dinnertime or story time. Yet that’s myfirst love.” Smart grew up in Seattle and started out in regional Theatre. She reports that she hopes to return to the stage later this year.

“I’ve just been offered a play in Los Angeles,” she says, “and I’m being considered for one in New York.” Also on deck is a supporting role in Great Hope Springs, a film comedy starring Meryl Streep. “I play Meryl’s best friend,” Smart says. “She’s doing the film with TommyLee Jones.” Some have said that there are more roles for 50-plus women these days, as the baby boomers age. Smart doesn’t see it, though.

“Not really,” the actress says. “No, unfortunately.” Nonetheless, she lives in hope of better things. “Maybe advertisers will realise that we baby boomers have a lot of money,” Smart says, “and that they no longer have to go after the teenage dollar. I never had any money when I was a teenager.”
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“Designing Women” creator Linda Bloodworth-Thomason once wrote that actress Jean Smart’s character on the 1980s sitcom had “legs that stretched out for five or six miles, and one of those laughs that made you feel like riding around in a convertible.”

Some 25 years later, Smart’s girl-next-door looks, legs and laugh are intact, making her casting of Prince Charles’s matronly second wife, Camilla Parker Bowles, all the more surprising — except to Smart herself.

“The thing is, I started out in the theater, so I always did all kinds of parts — all different ages, all kinds of parts,” Smart explained recently, while promoting the TV movie “William & Catherine: A Royal Romance,” which debuts Saturday night (9 p.m. EDT) on the Hallmark Channel. “And, actually, Camilla was adorable when they were younger.”

Smart said she hopes the movie, which follows William and Catherine from introduction to proposal, sheds a new, positive light on Bowles, “the true love of Charles’s life,” as per Smart. Bowles was widely maligned by the public and press — especially in the wake of Princess Diana’s untimely death in 1997.

“Yes, there are a couple of moments where she has a nice, self-deprecating sense of humor about herself and the fact it’s taken a gaggle of stylists to kind of put her together and everything, and it’s kind of nice,” Smart said. “I really liked the way she was portrayed in the script, and a very sympathetic, likeable character, and I thought she … deserved that.”

The Seattle-born Smart will likely always be best known as Charlene Olivia Frazier Stillfield, the naïve but huge-hearted office manager at Atlanta’s Sugarbaker design firm, on the first five seasons (1986-91) of the sitcom “Designing Women.”

“Oh, yeah, it was a great job,” Smart recalled. “And we had a blast. And we’re all still friends. And we’re devastated by losing Dixie.”

Costar Dixie Carter died in April 2010 following complications from endometrial cancer. She was just 70.

“Oh, she was something else,” Smart noted, with a wistful smile. “And we all (the “Designing Women” leads) went to the funeral in Tennessee, her little hometown in Tennessee. Annie (Potts) and I flew down together. We met Delta (Burke),” Smart then pursed her lips and looked away, unable to continue for a few seconds, but then noting that Carter’s husband, actor Hal Holbrook, was “doing pretty well, considering they were inseparable.”

Since leaving “Designing Women,” Smart has actually enjoyed numerous TV-career highs: two Emmy Awards for guest appearances on “Frasier” (2000, 2001), a key role on the drama “24″ in 2006, the year it won the Emmy for drama series, and another of her own Emmys for playing Christina Applegate’s self-centered mother in the sitcom “Samantha Who?” (2008).

Smart was killed off in the first-season finale of “Hawaii Five-0″ last spring, but admitted flying into Honolulu for her occasional role as Hawaii’s governor was no tropical vacation. She said she’d arrive, be up at 4 a.m. to work, and hurry to be back on a plane to Los Angeles to be with her recently adopted toddler, Bonnie. (Smart is married to actor Richard Gilliland, and they also have an adult son, Connor.)

That said, she loved the series’ hunk factor, supplied by stars Alex O’Loughlin, Scott Caan and Daniel Dae Kim. “All three of them!” she exclaimed. “I mean Daniel, Daniel Dae Kim. I have this friend. She’s this darling, very southern, very Christian, married to a cute doctor, but she said (Smart breaks into a Southern accent), ‘Oh my god! If I met him, I think I’d just have to lick him. He was wearing those too-tight pants and that bulletproof vest. Oh my god! You worked with him. I’m going to have to lick you the next time I see you,’” she recounted, laughing.

On the horizon for Smart: possibly another play for the 2001 Tony nominee for the comedy “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” and a small role in a Meryl Streep film .

“I never was an ingenue,” Smart said. “So thank god. If I was, I mean, I can’t imagine how depressing that would be right around now. So, in many ways I do feel as if in the last several years I’ve sort of been in my prime in terms of work and things.

“So, it’s fun,” Smart continued. “But I do feel fortunate, because I know there’s just not much out there at all for women __ (Smart whispers) __ my age.”
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Jean Smart, who won two Emmys for her guest role on “Frasier” and a third for “Samantha Who?,” says she worries that a win may lead producers to think, Oh, now she’s probably more expensive.

“That’s not good, but I suppose if someone was not familiar with your work it might not hurt. It might help to say, ‘She won three Emmys,’ ” says Smart, who adds she was only disappointed that she didn’t win for her role as the first lady on “24.” “I will be honest that was like, aw, shucks. I’ll give you one of the ‘Frasiers’ back.’ “

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I would have loved to talk to Camilla,” says Jean Smart, who plays the former Camilla Parker-Bowles – now officially known as the duchess of Cornwall – in the television movie William & Catherine: A Royal Romance. “But the movie is not about her and Charles.”

The movie, which recounts the circumstances leading to the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton this past April, is scheduled to air on the Hallmark Channel on Aug. 27.

“From what I could glean,” the 61-year-old Smart says, “Camilla seems like she has a great sense of humour. She’s an outdoorsy kind of person and maybe not entirely comfortable in the limelight. It was difficult to find interviews with her. I think she’s a little camera shy. She was a little beat up by the media and the British public for a while.”

Is she an admirer of the duchess?

“As an actor I have to go with the person in the script,” Smart says, “and I liked that person very much. This film treats Camilla very sympathetically.

“Despite everything that happened, (she and Prince Charles) obviously loved each other for 40 years,” Smart says. “No matter how you feel about everything else, you’ve got to root for the fact that they’ve stuck it out and put up with a lot of abuse. Not that they didn’t make mistakes, perhaps, but they decided, ‘This is who we are and this is what we want. We’re happy, and please be happy for us.”‘

Smart, who completed the film earlier this year, is speaking by telephone from the set of the NBC series Harry’s Law. She will appear with series star Kathy Bates in this season’s first three episodes, and her role may become a recurring character.

“I’m Kathy’s nemesis,” Smart says. “I’m the world’s meanest DA”

In the course of her three-decade career, Smart has moved effortlessly from sweet to madcap to tough to villainous. Audiences may first have noticed her as naive office manager Charlene Frazier Stillfield on Designing Women (1986-1991) or as the female serial killer in Overkill: The Aileen Wuornos Story (1992). Fans of 24 (2006-2007) will recognise her as semi-nutty Martha Logan, the wife of the nefarious President Logan (Gregory Itzin).

Last season on Hawaii Five-0, Smart played the morally challenged Gov. Pat Jameson. Although the character was killed off in the first year’s final episode, she will return for at least one flashback in the second season.

“In some ways characters you love to hate are more fun to play,” Smart says. “Audiences really enjoy them. And the older I get, the easier it is to say, ‘I don’t care how I’m perceived.”‘

While filming William & Catherine: A Royal Romance, Smart had only one concern.

“I hope Camilla didn’t mind my playing her,” she says. “But we’re not seeing her in situations where she has to deal with painful things.”

Princess Diana (Lesley Harcourt) is seen only in flashback. Instead the film focuses on Prince William’s college years, when he met his bride-to-be at St Andrew’s University.

“It helped a lot that William sort of accepted Camilla,” says writer/producer/director Linda Yellen, who also wrote and produced The Royal Romance of Charles and Diana (1982) and met with Princess Diana three times, in a separate interview. “I think maybe the tragedy between Charles and Diana was that they thought they could marry and each would make the other into something else,” Yellen says. “It was never going to work.”

It’s tricky, of course, to make a movie about currently living people that recounts recent events that happened in the absence of movie cameras.

“I research very heavily,” Yellen says, “and always get at least two other sources for everything. The conversations are not (verbatim), nor were they in The Queen (2006) or The King’s Speech (2010). When you really feel you understand the dynamics of a relationship and you know certain facts, then you almost intuit what might have been said.”

As an example, she cites a key scene between the Queen (Jane Alexander) and Charles (Victor Garber).

 “The Queen says, ‘We’re products of our own time. I had to do what I had to do, and so did you,” Yellen says.

The film is not about the relationship between Charles and Camilla, but inevitably that relationship is a part of the story.

“Charles had to get married really quickly,” Yellen says, “and to a virgin. He was victimised by the circumstances. Camilla was his first love.”

Yellen has a generally favourable view of the often-controversial Camilla.

“She is a maligned person in the press,” the filmmaker says. ‘`But if you watch her progression since she’s been back with Charles, recognising her place next to him, she also has gotten more conventionally styled and attractive, although she doesn’t care about those things.

“I thought it would be very interesting to ask somebody like Jean, who has extraordinary comic timing, to play her,” Yellen says. “We toned down Jean’s natural good looks.”

Although Smart insists that she has never paid especial attention to the British royal family, she understands that such is not the case with many of her compatriots.

“Americans have a little bit of royalty envy,” the actress says. “We all want people to look up to, as much as we tear them down.

“It was fun to follow Diana a little bit,” she continues, “although I thought about her much more, unfortunately, when she was killed. It affected me more than I thought it would. Dying in a car accident is brutal, unnecessary and tragic. She was so young, healthy and beautiful, and she had these two darling little boys.”

Smart, who has been married to actor Richard Gilliland for 24 years, is a parent herself: Her son, Connor, is 21, and her daughter, Bonnie, is 3. Smart and Gilliland adopted her in 2009.

IHT-NYT News Syndicate

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