Daly Happily Still Doing Tyne On TV

'Judging Amy' Co-Star Talks About Good TV, Reality TV Shows

Telling Tyne
On her 50th birthday, Tyne Daly shaved every hair off her head. Bald and beautiful, the veteran actress wore wigs until her brunette locks grew back.

She shaved her head, she tells me, because she wanted to enter the next part of her life as fresh as a newborn.

It is a little known story, but one that demonstrates Daly's amazing spirit and flair for the dramatic.

For some, Daly will always be Mary Beth Lacey of the hit detective drama "Cagney & Lacey" that ran from 1982 to 1988 and co-starred actress Sharon Gless. It was the role that made her famous and earned Daly both respect and industry acclaim.

Earning four Emmy Awards playing New York City detective Lacey, Daly would earn a fifth Emmy Award in 1996 for her work as Alice Henderson on the short-lived CBS series "Christy."

But Daly's acclaim was not limited to television. On Broadway, Daly's portrayal of the showstopper Rose in "Gypsy" won her a Tony Award, a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critic's Circle Award.

This year, Daly returns for the second season of the CBS drama "Judging Amy" playing the gutsy and delightful Maxine Gray.

Judgment Day
"I think it was a really exciting freshman year," Daly tells me about "Judging Amy." "We took off really fast."

The popular show is loosely based on the life of Frederica Brenneman. The mother of series executive producer and star Amy Brenneman was one of the first women superior court judges in Connecticut.

"Amy was interested in the job she'd done and making an homage to her mother's work," Daly says. "But I'm not playing her (real) mother, and neither is Amy, really. Amy's playing a woman with her mother's job."

The show stars Brenneman as Judge Amy Madison Gray, a single mother who has left New York, become a family court judge in Hartford, Conn., and moved in with her mother Maxine.

Maxine has come out of retirement to resume her job as a compassionate and outspoken social worker.

Far from many one-dimensional characters often written for women of a certain age, Maxine is a strong-minded and multi-faceted dynamo.

"It's nice to play someone who's not just her children's opinion of her," Daly says.

"I get to talk about a woman at a stage of her life that doesn't get investigated very much, except as a cartoon," she says. "Although she's difficult and prickly, she's still a human being."

The interplay between mother and daughter is one that Daly savors.

"I'm interested in the generational dynamic. You know: the mother and the daughter, and her daughter," Daly tells me.

"I find myself now wishing that I lived in some kind of African crawl where the family is all sort of circled together. My mother is about to be 80; my mother-in-law is 84. They live in apartments by themselves, and I sometimes yearn for them to be a little closer," she says.

"Judging Amy" has also tackled the taboo subject of romance among older people.

Yes, I mean sex.

"Sex after 60 seems quite interesting to people," Daly says. "That's kind of cute."

"I'm also interested in a woman, in any stage, being a whole unto herself without a man's arm or other parts of his anatomy to validate her," she continues.

Kitchen-Table Wisdom
Although Daly has enjoyed success on the big screen as well as the stage, it is the medium of television that has offered her the best opportunity to apply her craft.

But now with shows like "Big Brother" and "Survivor" gaining so much popularity, does she think that dramatic television is in danger of extinction?

"It's a fashion. Truth is stranger than fiction," Daly says of the so-called reality shows. "I think that we can get something out of art that you can't get just observing your family around the kitchen table.

"I'm not really big on analyzing the state of the art. I'm an actor; I have a very narrow sphere of expertise," she says with a laugh. "In general, television offers a better place for people, human beings."

She says that the stories told in movies are more "big-blue-screen" plots.

Daly explains: "(An actor stands in front of the blue screen) and spends a lot of time feigning terror about aliens or huge waves or whatever it is you're terrified of. The movie industry has kind of dwindled into hugeness. The personal story and the story that has to do with intimate human feelings works better on television."

Judging Emmy
Daly's Emmy nomination for best supporting actress this year is her 11th, and although the award went to NBC's "West Wing" star Allison Janney, Daly has quite a collection of statuettes already.

So where does one keep five Emmy Awards?

"My mom's house on the shelf," Daly tells me.

She jokes: "(My mom) took them off the piano because it annoyed my siblings so much.

"My kid brother Timmy (actor Tim Daly) just got robbed. I was really hoping for a nomination for him for 'Execution of Justice,' which I thought was a wonderful thing."

Tim Daly currently also stars on the CBS network on the new drama "The Fugitive."

It could easily be argued that "Judging Amy" has evolved into a show with two strong leading women. But when Emmy nominations were announced, Brenneman was nominated for best actress and Daly in the supporting role -- a fact that does not bother Daly in the least.

"I've always been a supporting actor, in my own opinion. I think that's an actor's job: I support first the writer, then the director, and then my colleagues," Daly says. "That's part of the gig is to be supporting. I don't have a lot of fun acting alone."

Daly also understands the importance of being the recipient of television's highest honor.

"What they mean is that there's, first of all, some kind of peer approval. So it means my acting's still working for people who do it. It also means maybe that I can keep on acting for a while," she tells me.

Play 'Christy' For Me
There have been rumors that Daly was to revive her celebrated role of Miss Alice in a remake of "Christy" for the PAX television network. The original show starred Kellie Martin, formerly of "ER," in the title role.

But Daly says that she turned down the part because her "Judging Amy" shooting schedule prohibited her participation.

"I really did love her and I loved the project," Daly says of the role. "I can't do double duty."

And who might replace her in the role?

"They're going to ask (former 'Cagney & Lacey' co-star) Sharon Gless to do it," Daly says. "They were going to ask her in the first place.

"I asked them why she didn't take the gig in the first place, and the producers told me it was because she married well."

Gless, who lives in Florida, is currently shooting the new Showtime series "Queer as Folk," the British sensation that has come stateside.

And what about another "Cagney & Lacey" reunion movie?

"I'd certainly listen if somebody said something," she says.

Case Dismissed
"It's soul-destroying to have to play out those stories each week about children in pain, that are misused or abused," Daly says of "Judging Amy's" heartbreaking storylines. "Hopefully, what we counter-balance that with is the home front, where folks are trying to make a life in the modern world."

Daly refused to give away any secrets about the upcoming season.

"The thing that's interesting about series television is that it's kind of like life: You don't know what's going to happen next," she says. "We're making it up as we go along."

The Big Scoop