Marchand favored by Daly for Emmy
And 'Judging Amy' actress knows her stuff

Beacon Journal - August 10, 2000

By R.D. Heldenfels

When the Emmy Awards are handed out in September, Tyne Daly will have a chance to take home her sixth -- following four best drama-actress wins for CBS drama Cagney & Lacey and a best supporting actress award for another CBS drama, Christy.

But Daly, who's been nominated 11 times overall, doesn't think her work on Judging Amy merits an award for best supporting actress in a drama this year.

"I'm fairly convinced that this year the prize belongs to Nan Marchand," said Daly, referring to the Sopranos co-star who died in June.

Marchand "did spectacular work, and the best work on television for a woman in that category," Daly told a group of reporters during network presentations for the Television Critics Association awhile back.

If the TV academy is smart, they'll just say, "Yes, Miss Daly," and announce the prize for Marchand right now.

Daly is one of the best actresses ever to work in television and -- in the most complimentary sense -- one tough broad.

She played Dirty Harry Callahan's toughest partner -- in 1976's The Enforcer. Cagney & Lacey's history included three different Chris Cagneys -- Loretta Swit, Meg Foster and finally Sharon Gless -- but Daly was the only Mary Beth Lacey. Kellie Martin may have been the titular star of Christy, but Daly's work as Alice Henderson gave the show a strong and steadying hand.

Sitting in a small meeting room in a Pasadena, Calif., hotel, Daly matter-of-factly announced "Now I'm going to smoke" in what was clearly a no-smoking room, with a smoke alarm over her head. Not one of the 50 people in the room kept her from lighting up.

To do so might have ended Daly's cheerful bits of show-biz lore (Gless was the first choice for her Christy role), ruminations on acting and just plain odd stuff.

In the last category falls how Daly marked her 50th birthday three years ago.

"I decided that I wanted to come as a naked babe into the second half of my life as I had in the first," she said. She was working on a movie at the time and had already been fitted for wigs for the part, so "I shaved every hair on my body except my eyebrows -- because I had to be on camera."

And in case you're wondering, Daly said, "I don't know what I'm going to do at 60."

But what she's doing right now is focusing on Judging Amy, which airs at 10 p.m. Tuesdays on CBS. Daly plays social worker Maxine Gray, mother of rookie judge Amy Gray (Amy Brenneman). The two jobs overlap, and at times Maxine and Amy have had courtroom conflicts.

The series is taking enough of her time and energy that she had to pass on reprising Miss Alice for some new Christy movies Pax TV has in the works.

Daly likes her Judging Amy role because "I get to talk about a woman at a stage in her life that doesn't get investigated very much, except as a cartoon. We marginalize kids and old people as jokes.

"Although she's difficult and prickly, she's a human being . . . a person who still has vitality and something to contribute and a point of view," she said. "It's nice to play someone who's not just her children's opinion of her. Who's herself."

Daly has television in her blood. Her father, the late James Daly, starred in the series Medical Center. Her younger brother Tim is back in prime time this fall with the new version of The Fugitive. But sometimes TV makes her blood boil.

"My dad started to work in television when I was a kid and at that time it was going to be this wonderful new technological breakthrough that was going to bring the world together and show each other our disparate cultures and somehow, you know, pull us all together," she said.

"And it's dwindled into nastiness and demonstrating to young children how to do crime and to be sort of inured to dead bodies and murder and difficulty of all description."

Women, especially mature women, have not had much luck in TV -- or in society generally, Daly said. When the Survivor islanders made their first exile 63-year-old Sonja, Daly said it was "cultural confirmation. Here's an old lady, she's of no use, get rid of her."

When Judging Amy began, Maxine was no longer an active social worker and Daly said, "I thought she'd be doing all sorts of fun stuff like learning French. . . . But then they put her back to work. And so I'm catching up in terms of my research. . . .

"I love the dynamic in the show that the mama is on the front lines of the problems, the social problems. She knocks on the door and says, 'Good morning. I understand you're beating your kid.' . . . And the daughter, the younger woman, is at the end of that process where she makes the final judgment about whether you get to keep the kid or not. . . . That has a lot of possibilities in it."


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