Baranski’s throwback flair
TV star who resembles 1940s actors like Russell and Arden hopes her laugh — and legs — are her legacy
At 70, Christine Baranski is busier than ever.
She has wrapped up the sixth and final season of Robert and Michelle King’s “The Good Fight,” a spinoff of “The Good Wife.” The show has continued the adventures of the liberal Chicago lawyer Diane Lockhart, now working at a prestigious, predominantly Black law firm. The beginning of the end is now streaming on Paramount+.
She is also filming the second season of Julian Fellowes’ frock opera “The Gilded Age.” And on her breaks from TV, she has been studying T.E. Lawrence and Oscar Wilde at Oxford University.
Now her biggest ambition, she jokes, is to play the Fool to Meryl Streep’s Lear.
She could do it. She has theater chops and went to Juilliard in a golden era that produced Robin Williams, Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline and Mandy Patinkin.
“I wasn’t movie-star beautiful,” she said, “which is probably why I didn’t aspire to be a film actress.”
But she became a TV star in her 40s and wowed fans with her comedy skills in movies like “The Birdcage,” “Bowfinger” and “Mamma Mia!”
Baranski is a throwback to those 1940s actors like Rosalind Russell and Eve Arden who could be campy and glamorous, cutting and moving, wicked and loyal, all at the same time. In other words, the perfect best friend.
But the actor isn’t as starchy as Agnes van Rhijn, her character in “The Gilded Age,” a fearsome figure who, not unlike Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey,” can level you with one put-down or averted gaze. That’s a type that Julian Fellowes, the creator of both shows, calls “sardonic old survivors,” matriarchs trying to hold up the slipping standards of society.
Unlike Aunt Agnes, Baranski has been known to have nude swimming parties in the moonlight at her lake house in Connecticut with fellow actors like Mark Rylance and Cherry Jones.
“Christine exudes class and grace, but she can throw back a martini, eat a hot dog and talk sports with the best of them,” said Julianna Margulies, who starred with Baranski in “The Good Wife.”
Baranski is an opera aficionado and a devout Buffalo Bills fan, with a T-shirt that says “Buffalo, a drinking town with a football problem.” And as for her martinis, she said, she likes Grey Goose with a twist — and vermouth just as “an afterthought.” She stops at one and a half, unable to keep up with her character in the 1990s sitcom “Cybill,” Maryann Thorpe, who was fabulously dressed, politically incorrect and never without her favorite accessory: a martini. Maryann was so popular that Baranski shied away from tippling roles afterward, for fear of getting typecast.
Michael Kahn, who taught Baranski acting at Juilliard, gave her high praise, saying, “She plays somebody who’s tipsy better than anyone I know.” It’s easier for women to be funny acting drunk than men, Baranski said.
“She has a little Elaine Stritch in her,” said Baranski’s “Mamma Mia!” co-star Streep, whose oldest daughter, Mamie Gummer, worked with Baranski in “The Good Fight” and whose youngest daughter, Louisa Jacobson, plays the ingenue in “The Gilded Age.”
Baranski’s grandparents were immigrants who had been stage actors in their native Poland. She grew up in a blue-collar Polish American neighborhood in a suburb of Buffalo. Her father, who died when she was 8 years old, edited a Polish-language newspaper, and her mother had a job ordering parts for air-conditioning factories.
Baranski went to a Catholic girls’ school, and in high school, she adopted a grander way of speaking, akin to Madonna’s odd English accent.
“I think I decided I didn’t want to sound like a Buffalo girl,” she recalled, “and people would ask me, ‘Are you English?’ I’d say, ‘No, I’m just affected.’ ”
She had trouble with the sibilant “S” and was rejected from Juilliard when she first auditioned. After she capped her two front teeth — “I had a gap like Lauren Hutton’s, but not as beautiful” — and took speech lessons, the drama school let her audition again, with a page full of S’s. She did a speech of Viola’s from “Twelfth Night,” but mispronounced Viola.
“It’s Vy-ola,” a judge on the faculty boomed. “Vee-ola is the instrument. Wrong department.”
Baranski joked that she was admitted “by the skin of my teeth.”
Then, maybe just to show them, she won acclaim starring in a cascade of “S” productions: Shakespeare, Tom Stoppard, Stephen Sondheim, Neil Simon, Cybill Shepherd and “The Simpsons.”
She was married for 30 years to the actor Matthew Cowles until his death in 2014. He had a long recurring role on “All My Children” as Billy Clyde Tuggle.
They had two daughters: Isabel, who has a law degree and is a writer, and Lily, an actor who just produced her own film, a surreal short about a woman who loses her teeth, one by one.
Her friends rave about Baranski’s dedication as a mother, noting she flew back on a red-eye from Los Angeles to Connecticut every weekend when she was filming “Cybill.” And they are amazed at the flair she puts into being a grandmother to three boys.
King, the “Good Fight” co-creator, marveled at how Baranski would not simply bathe her grandchildren: “She bathes them outdoors and pretends to be a witch and throws a cauldron of water on them and cackles.”
“I’m a terrifying, wonderful witch,” the actor said brightly. “My mission is to keep them away from screens because when we raised our girls in Connecticut, there was no TV in the house. I know children can have happy childhoods without being mesmerized and stupefied by screens.”
King said that Baranski was also nurturing to the crew. “If somebody needs help, she is just going to quietly give it,” she said.
Speaking of “Good Fight,” “one of the great things about that character,” Baranski said of Diane, “is that she was never portrayed as a victim. I don’t like playing victims. I’d be terrible as the long-suffering wife.” She said that’s also why she liked playing Thorpe, who “had her three-martini lunches and then planned creative revenge on her exhusband.”
Baranski was asked about her Tiffany’s window of laughs. She has about 12 different ones, all sparkling — ranging from sultry to sarcastic.
“I like to be known for my laugh,” Baranski said. “My laugh and my legs, that would be my legacy. Laugh, legs, legacy. I always said if I could be photographed from the waist down, I’d have a great film career.”