I had a love affair with dry martinis. I still miss them..every single night
In her memoirs, out this week, Sharon Gless tells of her incredible life on and off screen and reveals how she is winning her battle with alcoholism
SHARON Gless admits to having had many lovers and numerous affairs during her turbulent 30-year marriage but there was one romance that almost killed her – booze.
“I had a love affair with martinis,” admits the star of iconic 80s hit TV series Cagney & Lacey in her new memoir.
Hospitalised for abdominal pain with pancreatitis, surgeons ordered her to stop drinking six years ago. “I did,” she says. “For about 36 hours.” Another martini sent her back to the hospital in agony, where her doctor warned: “If you ever have another drink again, don’t call me. I don’t do suicides.”
The actress finally realised she couldn’t do it alone, joined Alcoholics Anonymous and hasn’t had a drink since. Yet the romance lingers.
She said: “I still miss my Hendrick’s dry martini, stirred not shaken every single night.” Gless, 78, reveals her descent into alcoholism, her turbulent love life and career highs and lows in her deeply personal new memoir, Apparently There Were Complaints, published in the UK next week.
The book’s title reflects how her strong-willed personality often rubbed people up the wrong way.
Admitting to being called “impudent”, “naive”, “fat”, “angry”, “a homewrecker”, “a bitch” and “a drunk”, she said: “I made the book about all the complaints people had about me throughout my life. “There were so many complaints – and many came from my family.” But there was also a lot of kudos and many awards.
The striking, huskyvoiced blonde starred as Christine Cagney, opposite Tyne Daly, in Cagney & Lacey – the first hour-long TV series to feature two female leads. The
We changed the history of television for women SHARON GLESS ON CAGNEY & LACEY
show lured 30million viewers weekly in the US and she went on to star in groundbreaking series Queer As Folk, as the devoted mother of a gay son, in action drama series Burn Notice, and three West End plays.
But she confesses to one major regret – gaining 40lbs to play plump psychotic Annie Wilkes in the 1992 West End production of Misery.
She said: “When I got the part, they said, ‘We’ll make you a fat suit’. Well, I’d just gone into menopause and I said, ‘You don’t have to do that. I’ll take care of that!’ It was one of the dumbest things I’ve done in my life.”
Born in 1943, Gless was the granddaughter of a Hollywood lawyer who represented Cecil B DeMille, Howard Hughes and Katherine Hepburn.
Her parents divorced when she was 14 and, feeling abandoned, she considered becoming a nun.
Sent to a Catholic university, she went to many boozy parties and fell in love with a married law student before being expelled from uni.
She then worked in a lingerie shop, ran a telephone switchboard and spent years in advertising before, at the age of 26, taking acting classes.
Famed acting coach Estelle Harman called her audition “the worst performance” she had ever seen.
However, she was spotted performing in a play at an old people’s home and became the last actor ever signed as a Universal Pictures contract player, leading to guest roles on 70s TV shows Ironside and McCloud.
She was always on call and producer Richard Zanuck picked her out from a clutch of headshots for a dinner date with rising young director Steven Spielberg. She found him “very nice” but they had zero chemistry.
Cagney & Lacey made her a star, and the detective was financially independent, ambitious, slept around and demanded respect at her precinct.
Gless said: “We dealt with issues such as abortion, physical and sexual abuse, alcoholism, cancer. We changed the history of television for women. While we were on the air no other actress won the Emmy for six years. I won two and Tyne Daly won four.”
Yet she initially rejected the role, which went instead to Meg Foster.
She said: “I’d just done a pilot where I played a cop and it didn’t sell, and I didn’t want to go around carrying a gun.”
When Foster was fired after six episodes, producers begged Gless to reconsider and she admits: “It’s the luckiest, happiest decision I ever made.”
But her personal life mirrored freeliving, risk-taking Cagney’s. She partied and had an affair with the show’s married producer Barney Rosenzweig.
Weekends in the 80s were “a haze of booze and cocaine,” she recalls.
At times she was so drunk she blacked out. But Gless added: “I would never drink or do drugs on the job. God knows I did some damage on my own time, but never on the set.”
As Cagney slipped into alcoholism on screen to handle the pressures as a cop, Gless recognised her own problem and checked into rehab. Rosenzweig left his wife and married Gless in 1991. She regretted it at first but they stayed together and recently celebrated their 30th anniversary.
As well as weight issues, she also struggled with public misconceptions arising from Cagney & Lacey –that she must be gay, and that she and Daly were at each other’s throats. Instead, the duo remain best friends and speak daily.
She stopped drinking for 15 years when Cagney & Lacey was cancelled after seven hit seasons in 1988 but then started again.
Boozing at her 60th birthday bash took her close to death’s door but she is now sober and in therapy.