Tyne Daly: Telling It How It Is

Westside Today - October 29, 2004

By Caroline Ryder

In just one hour talking with Tyne Daly, the feisty actress who burst on to our TV screens in beloved 1980's cop show ‘Cagney & Lacey', we cover poetry, politics, charities, feminism, aging and more. When our conversation ends, she looks at the tape recorder and says "Good luck making sense of all that!" Fortunately, if there's one thing the opinionated and articulate Tyne Daly is good at, it's making sense.

After 43 years in showbiz, the 58-year-old actor, mother and grandmother still has her feet planted firmly on the ground. Currently starring in CBS series ‘Judging Amy', she's managed to achieve enduring success in Hollywood without succumbing to the pressures faced by many actresses of her age.

For instance, rather than going under the knife in a bid to stay forever young, she decided to make herself look even older, just so she could score the roles she wanted.

"Women are usually only interesting to studio executives when they are fecund, between the ages of 15 and 30," says Tyne, who has lived in Beverly Hills for more than five years. "I decided to get through the really tough patch, around 50, by just cutting my price and playing ten years older. I didn't want to have to wait until I was an old lady to play one."

As part of her transformation into an ‘old lady' she shaved off her dyed chestnut locks and let her naturally gray hair grow through. "My daughters and my granddaughter came over and we buzzed off my hair, and I finished off with a razor in the shower," she recalls, laughing. "Staying young is very overrated in our culture. I think we are meant to hang around and grow and change. And if you don't live life in order to change, grow old and die, which is what happens to those of us that are lucky, then what are you doing?"

We meet in her trailer on the Fox lot in Century City, where she's filming the next series of ‘Judging Amy', now in its fifth year. She was nominated for an Emmy this year for her role as the show's matriarch, Maxine. She's still wearing makeup ("I thought I'd keep it on so as not to scare anyone"), and talks a mile a minute, punctuating her flow with jolly laughter.

She pauses for thought when talking about the things she cares about most, like women's rights. When I say she had balls for shaving off her hair, she corrects me. "Not balls dear, womb. I had womb. Womb is a different thing. It's very easy to misinterpret the women's movement and think its all about turning into a man."

Her role as a women's icon stems back to her Cagney & Lacey days, a show touted as feminism's answer to Starsky & Hutch. With co-star Sharon Gless' Detective Chris Cagney at her side, Daly's character Detective Mary Beth Lacey tracked down street criminals and battled chauvinists at the station while being a wife and mother to three children. "That show was a window of opportunity to talk about women's lives, a radical thing at the time," Daly says. The series won numerous awards, Daly's Emmys for Best Actress in 1982-83 and 1983-84 among them. Cagney & Lacey lasted six years, and "there's never been anything quite like it since," she says.

After the show ended, Daly went on to devote her energies to the Broadway stage, scoring a major success as Mama Rose in a revival of the 1959 musical Gypsy.

She also found time to be affiliated to more than 50 charities. Her favorite causes include homelessness, breast cancer and AIDS. "I'm in one of the only businesses where you work ten months a year, 15 hours a day and people still say, ‘so, what else are you doing'! I tend to try and pick charities that aren't so big they already have plenty of people to choose from."

One of her favorites is the Actors' Fund, which she's been a member of since she was 15. "The first thing you did right after you got your Equity card was to take a little piece of your first salary and become a member of the Actor's Fund," she says. "They used to give poor actors new shoes if they had an audition to go to." Daly is appearing at a big Actors' Fund benefit on November 6, and urges readers to go (you can find the ticket hotline number at the end of this article). Honoring prolific stage songwriter Cy Coleman, the event will feature performances from a host of celebrities, including Daly and Mr Coleman himself.

On top of her charitable work, Daly is also a mother of three and grandmother of two. Shortly before our interview she went to see her young grandson play in a soccer match, where he ended up knocking out two front teeth. "It's a family tradition," she says. "I bashed mine out on a see-saw when I was 17, my sister broke her front teeth diving into a swimming pool, and my brother lost his throwing stones."

I point out that her teeth look great and ask her if she has had veneers n she says yes, "but I don't make them too pearly white or even". I ask her views on plastic surgery, and she says she has avoided all forms of surgery since a botched emergency appendectomy when she was 12. "I'm not really interested in getting cut unless it's life-threatening," she says. "But the ritual blood sacrifice to this business, show business, is disturbing. The people who get plastic surgery all say they are doing it for themselves and it is wonderfully fulfilling - but then I wonder why they sneak into hospital and sneak out with their bandages. If it's a celebration they should say ‘look at me! I'm all cut up!'"

I admire her outspokenness. She plays it down, joking "never mess around with an old lady who's not got much to lose", adding that nowadays she's much more comfortable speaking her mind than she used to be. "I feel less obliged to protect any made-up version of myself," she says. "When you're young, you want to make a good impression in Hollywood. But I've kind of moved on from caring very much about other peoples' judgments of me."

As we wrap up our interview, it strikes me that Tyne would be a great person to have around if one were a young actor, someone who could dispense good, solid advice when needed. I ask her if that's the case. "It's part of the wheel of life to start mentoring and passing things on," she says. "But I wanted to wait until I felt I knew enough. So I'm only now starting to talk to young actors, giving them advice on how to keep their heads in Hollywood."

They'd do well to listen.

‘The Best Is Yet to Come: The Music of Cy Coleman' event takes place Saturday November 6 at 8p.m. at the Luckman Fine Arts Complex, 5151 State University Drive on the California State University Campus. Advance tickets can be bought by calling 323 933 9266 ext. 54, or by visiting www.actorsfund.org. Tickets cost between $40 and $500.


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