'Judging Amy' Star Rules New Moms Should Have a Year Off

Zap2it - Apr 5, 2002

By Jacqueline Cutler

For every working mother who fantasizes that life would be perfect if only she had reliable help and a lucrative career, Amy Brenneman injects some cold reality.

Brenneman has all that and more. Yet the star of "Judging Amy" was miserable. So what if her show is No. 1 in its time period and, as co-creator and executive producer, Brenneman can pretty much do as she wants. Add to that she remains so in love with her husband of six years, TV director Brad Silberling, she can't mention him without beaming. To top it off, Brenneman gave birth to the couple's first child, Charlotte, a year ago.

Therein lies the rub. Just pulling herself away from Charlotte to go to work is torture. "Women should have a year maternity leave," Brenneman says. "After a year, you're ready [to return to work]."

She realizes her arrangement is far better than those of most working mothers. "I have a great situation because I can bring her," says Brenneman, who always works 16 hours a day.

Brenneman, 37, raves that she has a great nanny. Yet when the nanny takes Charlotte home, the show's makeup artist notices that the color drains from Brenneman's face.

"I had a low point around Thanksgiving," she says. "I kept thinking nothing is worth this. I don't care. I just don't care. I've been so into the motherhood mode that I just didn't care. I didn't want to work."

"I used to look through magazines and say, 'Oh, so-and-so got that role,'" she says. "I used to love working nights. As you get closer to the end of a week, you work later and later. Part of me really dug it. The executives would all go home. Now, I get up with her at 5:30."

She was at wits' end when, as on her TV show, a wise older woman came to her emotional rescue -- Tyne Daly, as smart in real life as she is in the role of Maxine, Judge Amy's social-worker mom. "I just turned to Tyne and said, 'Why am I working?' And she said, 'Because Charlotte will work one day and you can show her a woman can work with dignity.'"

Like Charlotte, Brenneman had a role model in her mother, on whose experiences as a superior-court judge the series is based. That, however, doesn't seem to mollify the actress's guilt.

At the moment, Brenneman looks like many stay-at-home moms. Sitting in a clubby restaurant of a midtown Manhattan hotel, she's in well-worn jeans and a plain white T-shirt, with no makeup and hair that could stand some fixing. She dropped the 45 pounds she gained during pregnancy, and she seems resigned to keep working.

At least the low point is over. "I don't want to be miserable," Brenneman says. "It will pass, so I want to look back on this time, and dig it."

Brenneman, in Manhattan to promote the third-year series, still seems a bit startled that it is on the air. NBC passed on it because it already had a pilot about a professional woman returning home to New England in "Providence." "CBS understood, and thought it would be wonderful for their demographic," she says. No one expected "Judging Amy" to reach beyond CBS' core of older viewers, but younger adults seem to be digging the show's tri-generational story lines.

When the show was being shopped, Brenneman took a vacation to India. "I was going to stay if it didn't work out," she says.

She had spent time in that part of the world when she was a Harvard student studying comparative religion. "I have my own motley faith," says Brenneman, who grew up attending Congregational Church. "I am definitely a God girl, a theist. I like God."

She lived in Nepal for seven months and learned sacred dancing from a priest. "I was interested in folk dances," she recalls. "He lived in a typical Nepali falling-down place with goats. I sat in this room with him in silence for 15 minutes. Then his wife came in and threw rose petals on me, and vermilion and flowers and perfumed water. I learned the dance."

The priest, through an interpreter, told her it was a sacred dance and she was never to perform it, except for a religious rite. "Six months later, I'm knocking back beers with friends," she recalls, and one asked her to do the dance. At that moment, she understood she couldn't trade on the sanctity of that dance for the sake of entertainment.

At Harvard, Brenneman helped form the Cornerstone Theater Company, which continues to tour rural America performing classic plays. She worked with the theatre company for five years. There also was a waitressing stint in Berkeley and a stint as a substitute teacher at a private Manhattan school. She says she was horrified when they offered her a job "considering how little I knew about the subject."

After a couple of less-than-memorable TV series, including the short-lived 1992 CBS drama series "Middle Ages" Brenneman was cast as Officer Janice Licalsi on ABC's "NYPD Blue" and became the first woman to appear nude on network television in prime time. She had no problems with it, "to my mother's horror," she says.


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