The entertainment industry gets a bad rap for not offering many good roles for women past the ingenue stage.
I would say that Christine Baranski would not make a good test case for this claim.
She’s knocking it out of the park as Diane Lockhart in CBS’ monster hit “The Good Wife.” She pops in every now and then to say hello to Johnny Galecki, with a recurring role as his character’s mother, Dr. Beverly Hofstader, on another monster hit show, “The Big Bang Theory.”
She’s also part of the ensemble cast for the upcoming theatrical release of James Lapine’s Broadway hit “Into The Woods.” She’ll play Cinderella’s mother.
She also played the perpetually drunk MaryAnn on Cybil and did quite well with it. Cybil was a toned down and Americanized version of Absolutely Fabulous and Patsy was a thoroughly irredeemable original incarnation of the MaryAnn character. Fortunately it was toned down for Cybil.
I’m not sure if playing the Mom of the main character in a sitcom, and the Mom of the main character in a movie is really a good counterargument to older actresses having limited roles available to them.
Anyhoo, liked her in Cybill. But I get her confused with the Mom from Arrested Development and the Mom in Castle. They all seem to speak with a similar affectation and play vaguely similar “overly dramatic, self-absorbed mother to adult children” characters.
She was brilliant on that show. That’s where I first became aware of her. She did one of the best Comic Drunks ever at a time when the Comic Drunk had nearly disappeared from the landscape of American entertainment (for more than a decade at this point, MADD had been telling us that alcoholism wasn’t funny).
Her character had a love interest named Richard and an ex-husband named Richard. She referred to the new guy as “The Good Dick” and the ex-husband as “The Bad Dick”.
The number one best (and possibly the only worthwhile) performance in that movie. I wanted her to be singing it to me.
Do you remember the Cybill episode when Cybill is sick in bed and CB comes up to see her, leaving her date, Tony, downstairs (“Oh don’t worry, he’s fine”) and it was Tony Bennett.
She is phenomenal in The Good Wife, especially this past season after the death of Will. She fired the emo assistant without hesitation but the scene I liked best is when she and Alicia just sat in her office without speaking.
I’m not sure if playing the Mom of the main character in a sitcom, and the Mom of the main character in a movie is really a good counterargument to older actresses having limited roles available to them.
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I’m also not sure why it’s necessary to make a politico-economic statement out of “here’s a middle-aged actress I like who gets some pretty good roles.”
Back on Cybill, Baranski also had some sexy going on. More recently, her appeal is about all diva, appropriately enough considering her prominence on Broadway.