'Judging Amy' Matriarch Lives As She Pleases

Zap2it - Jul 23, 2002

By Jacqueline Cutler

Tyne Daly does not bother to try to impress anyone. She revels in who she is. On a hot day, she sports blue nail polish on her fingers and toes, a multi-pocketed vest holding The New York Times, with the puzzle done and comfy slacks.

She settles into a divan, immediately removing the vest and exposing a retro camp shirt with fish on it. In an industry of starved women who rave about how wonderful everything is, Daly is a large woman with no compunctions about speaking her mind.

Having just finished her third year of playing Maxine, the pushy mom on "Judging Amy," that airs Tuesdays on CBS (10 p.m. ET), Daly is in the mood to talk. "I'm on vacation," she announces, and orders a Long Island iced tea, which packs quite a kick.

"I have been in this business for 40 years," she says. "Do you know what this is?" she asks, holding her gray braids straight out, making her resemble an aged Pippi Longstocking. "This is an act of defiance."

"Staying young for an actress is purportedly a job requirement," Daly says. "I will be the only actress who dies with her own face." It's the strong face of a 56-year-old woman who has lived. When she turned 50, she wanted to enjoy a meaningful ritual, and when there wasn't a tradition, she devised one. "I wanted to go to the North Woods and dance stark naked under the stars," she says. "None of my friends would go with me. So I got my daughters and my granddaughter to cut my hair and I shaved my head, and it was only three days before I got Velcro hair."

She sips her drink, and smiles as she leans back. This summer her only plans are to relax.

Last summer, she was in a play. "I left the set and went to Dublin," she says. "My theory is there's not a play you can't get done in four weeks -- if you know what you are doing." Her tone makes it quite clear that the unfortunate director was clueless. The experience was so awful that she called John Karlen, a close buddy who played her husband for six years on "Cagney p& Lacey."

"I told him, 'I'm finished in theater forever. I'm going back to TV where I belong.' And he said, 'You know you don't belong anywhere.'"

Daly loves that and laughs hard, loud enough to draw a few glances. Though she has been on television regularly since showing up on "The Mod Squad" in 1968, she is left alone.

Part of that, Daly says, is a result of the vibe she gives off. The other part is a result of a lesson learned many years ago. Daly's ex-husband, Georg Stanford Brown, was in a play with Alec Guinness, Lillian Gish, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Daly was not exactly at a high point in her life. She was 21, pregnant and coming off her first flop.

As she observed Taylor and Burton, it struck her how limiting such celebrity can be. "They never carried money," Daly says. "People were dying to buy them cigarettes. If they fought, he could go to the other side of the mansion, but he couldn't go out bowling. I knew that they loved each other, but they couldn't get away from each other. And I thought, 'That's not what I want. I want to be an actor and I want to be famous enough so I could get another gig, but not so famous that I could not go to the grocery store.'"

She succeeded. She works steadily and buys her own food. Along the way, she has won five Emmy Awards, a Tony for her 1990 portrayal of Mama in "Gypsy" and is enough of a familiar face that people notice her as she stands in an alcove, taking quick hits off an unfiltered Camel.

"I thought I would be a nun to the theater, until I laid eyes on Stanford across a room," she says. She smiles just thinking of her strikingly handsome ex-husband. "It's probably a mistake to marry a man prettier than you are."

For a moment, she is quiet. She and Brown were married 24 years and had three daughters. She originally left her beloved New York for Los Angeles because he landed a role in "Bullitt." She remained, but admits, "I live in L.A. only under protest."

Still, the town has been quite good to her. As many actresses note, roles become quite scarce as they age. Consider how rare these roles are when the actress actually embraces her age.

Maxine Gray, like Tyne Daly, is a most unusual character.

"She is difficult, I can't stand her," Daly says of Maxine. At the end of last season, Maxine finally came to her senses about Jared, a dashing millionaire played by Richard Crenna, who has been besotted by her. She had rejected him before, but they finally consummated their union.

"Judging Amy" handled this gracefully, like an old movie. They showed nothing -- no skin, no bedroom scenes -- yet when Jared and Maxine walked down the stairs the morning after -- he fastening cuff links, she humming -- the audience knew.

Besides the cranky and wise Maxine, Daly would love to play union organizer Mother Jones and feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton on stage.

As Daly talks about her craft, she becomes even more animated. Before each show, she toasts those who trod the boards before her. "It helps me to know I am in a long line of people who worked on stage," she says.

Daly has been around famous actors all of her life. Her father, James Daly, and mother, Hope Newell, were actors, as is her brother Tim Daly ("Wings") and her daughter Kathryne ("The Wedding Dress" ). Except for briefly considering becoming a biochemist in ninth grade because she had a crush on her teacher, Daly knew she wanted to be an actor since she was seven.

"The reason I know I was right is because I'm still sure," she says. As with everything, Daly states it in a way that brooks no questions.


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