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High Bench Marks
People - January 31, 2000
By TOM GLIATTO
TOM CUNNEFF in Los Angeles
Inspired by her mother's legal career, Amy Brenneman dons a robe to dispense justice on Judging Amy
Despite her role, "I'm pretty much of a goofball," says Brenneman (in Los Angeles). January 31, 2000 -- A
few years ago, Amy Brenneman decided to create a special 70th-birthday present for her mother, Connecticut Superior
Court Justice Frederica Brenneman. Videocam in hand, Brenneman interviewed lawyers, bailiffs and clerks at the
Hartford courthouse where her now-73-year-old mother served for more than 30 years on the juvenile-justice bench.
"Everybody gets scared to be in front of Judge Brenneman," says the actress, amused but impressed. But in
the end, "the impression I got is that she is a benevolent despot."
An inspiring one, to boot. That videotape gave Brenneman, 35, the idea for Judging Amy,her CBS series about a
high-powered Manhattan lawyer, Amy Gray, who, 6-year-old daughter in tow, moves back home to Connecticut to take a
job as a juvenile-court judge and live with her blunt but good-hearted mother (Tyne Daly). Brenneman's real-life
father, Russell, 71, an environmental lawyer, has jokingly called the show "an insane homage," but Amy
quickly stood out as the season's top-rated new drama. Brenneman's mother -- the second female judge to be appointed
in Connecticut and one of the first women to graduate from Harvard Law School, class of '53 -- helps shore up the
show's authenticity as an unpaid, uncredited consultant. "When she'd first give us notes," says Brenneman
of her mother, now semiretired and on the bench in Bridgeport, Conn., "they were just blindingly
critical."
In court, "there's no sexiness," says the star (with costar Richard T. Jones). She got over it. Besides,
as executive producer, Brenneman holds the show together during good times and bad. In December a few unattended
candles started a fire that gutted her trailer on the L.A. set while she was out being fitted for a costume.
"She was very upset," says costar Dan Futterman, who plays her younger brother, a would-be writer.
"It burned all of her Christmas presents for us, so she went around telling everyone what their gift would have
been."
"She's grounded," says Brad Silberling (with his wife in L.A. last March). Brenneman's parents once hoped
she would become an attorney like her brother Matthew, 39. (Her other sibling, Andy, 38, produces computer
software.) But Brenneman, who grew up in the suburb of Glastonbury, Conn., discovered in a grade school production
of The Music Manthat she preferred to court an audience's applause. She majored in religion at her parents' alma
mater, Harvard, and after graduating in 1987 put in her time on the road as a fledgling theater actress before
making her series debut on the short-lived TV drama Middle Ages in 1992.
The next year, Brenneman became watercooler fodder (and Emmy nominee) on ABC's NYPD Blue,where she played David
Caruso's girlfriend and appeared in the buff in the premiere. Still, the most significant episode in her 1 1/2
seasons on NYPD was No. 6, directed by a new acquaintance, Brad Silberling (City of Angels), 36, who would become
her spouse. With the series getting started, those were hectic days, "but that's why it was great," he
says. "We saw each other through the swirl."
Married in 1995, they live in a five-bedroom lodge-style house in Los Angeles with a basset hound, Maggie, and a
chocolate lab, Ruby. "We're low-maintenance," says Silberling, who directed Amy's pilot. "If we have
a cup of coffee, we're happy." They'd like to have children, but Brenneman has been too caught up with Amy even
to watch TV's other famous female judge. "But I know Judge Judy's manner," says Brenneman. "I kind of
dig it."
Her mother, on the other hand, is still getting used to being so intimately associated with a hit show. "She's
a little mystified by the world of TV," says Tyne Daly, who has met the judge on her occasional visits to the
set. "To see her daughter in the costume she wears when she goes to work, the same mock-up courtroom -- there
must be a certain amount of Twilight Zone in that."
Copyright © 2000 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
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