Buckley finds love in ‘Hello, Dolly!’

Call her the unexpected Dolly. “It wasn’t on my list at all!” exclaims Tony winner Betty Buckley.

The Broadway and TV star — remembered fondly by many as patient stepmom Abby in TV’s “Eight Is Enough” — is headlining the tour of “Hello, Dolly!” that plays from Nov. 27-Dec. 2 at Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.

Her Tony came in 1983, as the original Grizabella — singer of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Memory” — in “Cats.” After decades in show business, “Hello, Dolly!” marks the first major tour for the 71-year-old actress. So was touring on her bucket list?

“It wasn’t something I had considered!” she says with a laugh.

For one, she had to leave behind her horses, donkey and cats on the Texas ranch she calls home. Not her three dogs, though. She insisted they travel with her, and found a sympathetic ear. “Dolly” producer Scott Rudin “is a dog lover,” she confides.

Buckley’s assistant also has a dog.

“We drove in a van from New York to Utica to Cleveland to Chicago with all our creatures,” Buckley recalls. “It’s a really interesting adventure.” Ah, the glamour of showbiz. It’s worth it, Buckley says, to star in the chipper Jerry HermanMichael Stewart musical about a turn-of-the-20th-century widow who learns to embrace life again and finds love along the way.

“I really never understood the show,” she says about why the role of Dolly Levi — beloved of divas everywhere — was not on her radar. Then she saw Rudin’s recent Broadway revival, which won Bette Midler a Tony award for playing the title role.

“I thought it was one of the most wonderful pieces of musical theater I’d seen,” Buckley says. “I literally was standing and crying with the rest of the audience in joy and rapture.”

She says the work’s message shines through the storytelling in this latest production of the 1964 show. That message? “Love,” she says simply. “Connection with other human beings. Expressing the joy and beauty