BARANSKI REDEFINES FEMININITY
Good Wife star’s law firm boss is strong, smart and sensible
It’s hard picture Christine Baranski without a Martini in hand. Think Maryann Thorpe, the cocktails-willing, dry- witted, ex-husband-maligning sidekick to Cybill Shepherd’s heroine in the mid- 1990s sitcom, Cybill.
More recently, Baranski lit up 2008’ s ABBA film spectacular, Mamma Mia!, and her big number ( wearing a red swimsuit, jiving and having the time of her life with a crowd of semi- naked young men) also featured something fruity in a Martini glass. Today, though, on a rare day off from shooting the CBS legal drama The Good Wife, she’s in a grey sweater and huge, ovoid sunglasses.
A decade or so after Cybill ended, Baranski found another TV role that proved to be just as rewarding. Diane Lockhart is the compassionate powerhouse at the heart of The Good Wife: senior partner at her Chicago law firm and a mentor to the show’s heroine ( played by Julianna Margulies), the wife of a disgraced politician.
“There is a moral authority to the character,” Baranski says. “I love her intelligence, I love that she’s in command of the facts. I think it’s great to see a woman who’s not just an emotional self or, at times, not an emotional being at all — she’s an intellectual being. There are so many women who are running companies and institutions and are heads of government and they’re not represented in the media.”
So often, Baranski says, powerful and successful women are instead portrayed as damaged: “They’ve got to be crippled, they’ve got to be handicapped. Diane clearly isn’t any of those things.”
The show’s female characters — Baranski and Margulies, and Archie Panjabi, who plays the firm’s private investigator — are consistently more interesting than their male counterparts. Baranski agrees, diplomatically.
“The women do show a particular kind of strength and resilience,” she says.
That resilience was especially impressive in the fifth series, when Baranski’s character had to weather the death of her friend and business partner. Baranski herself lost her husband last May. She and fellow actor Matthew Cowles had been together for 31 years, a union that produced two daughters. Remarkably, Baranski returned to the set two months after his death.
“You know, I didn’t really have a choice, because Good Wife is my job. I was still pretty frail and shaky, but I just went back to my family of colleagues and crew, all of whom were so wonderful, and having to work focused my energy and gave me a reason to get up.
“Death is very disorienting, you know, it’s not just sad. Matthew had been in decline for many years, and then in a steep decline, but no matter what you think in terms of preparing for it? You’re still shocked when they’re just gone from the world.”
Cowles was diabetic, and by the time he reached age 69 he was “fighting great odds,” she says.
“Matthew died rather quietly, at home in the next room. He was a marvellous, most original, most wonderful man and I didn’t want to see him suffer indefinitely, but I certainly miss him.”
One lifeline in her grief has been their grandson, Max, born five months before Cowles died.
There exists the stereotype of the aging actress horrified by the loss of her youth, but Baranski’s head is screwed on far too firmly for all that.
“We’re obsessed with a kind of beauty now that I think is really getting in the way of us seeing people. It certainly gets in the way of us seeing actresses,” she says. “You see actresses who are beautiful and holding on for dear life, doing all kinds of menacing things with their faces. As Diane, I am literally growing old in front of the camera, but, you know, Julianna and I often say it’s great for the public to see what women look like. God help us if we reach a point in our industry where nobody even knows what a 50- or 60- year- old woman looks like.”