![]() ![]() On March 18th of this year, Gilliland died suddenly, of a heart condition. Shackleford, the onscreen boyfriend of Smart’s castmate Annie Potts. During filming, Smart met her husband, the actor Richard Gilliland, who played J. For Smart, the show ushered in new career opportunities: work in films (“The Brady Bunch Movie,” “Homeward Bound”), appearances on “Frasier,” “24” and “Hawaii Five-0,” and a handful of leading sitcom roles. In 1986, she was cast as Charlene Frazier-Stillfield, the sweet, affable office manager on the beloved CBS sitcom “Designing Women.” Along with “Murphy Brown,” it was one of the first sitcoms to focus on the trials and tribulations of working women, and it became a cultural phenomenon. She went on to have a robust stage career before transitioning to roles onscreen, including television movies (her first big job was a made-for-TV bio-pic of the serial killer Aileen Wuornos) and plenty of quippy sitcoms. Smart grew up in Seattle and got her start doing Shakespeare plays at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. As Deborah Vance, in “Hacks,” Smart looks impossibly glamorous in drapey cashmere and gold lamé, and delivers bawdy one-liners at sold-out Las Vegas standup shows. As Helen, Smart wore butt padding and a shaggy wig, and occupied herself playing games of Fruit Ninja on her iPad and hiding pints of ice cream in bags of frozen veggies so the rest of the family wouldn’t find it. What made Smart’s performances stand out all the more was how dramatically different they were from one another, even if the two characters have in common a spiky sense of humor and acid tongues. Starring in two shows on the same network at the same time is unusual enough. The “Hacks” season premièred less than a month after the release of the hit HBO drama “ Mare of Easttown,” in which Smart had a starring role as Helen Fahey, the wizened mother to Kate Winslet’s melancholic detective. But it must be said that Smart is having a remarkable year. Jean Smart has been working steadily for more than forty years, from her first onscreen appearance, a small walk-on part as “Woman Bather” in the 1979 made-for-television movie “Before and After,” to her starring role as a millionaire standup comedian on HBO Max’s “Hacks.” In that sense, the current chatter about a Jean Smart renaissance (Jeanaissance?) is a bit surprising-she never went away.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |