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 DOWNLOAD (pdf)Rue McClanahan’s “Real” Job
By David Martindale
Early in Rue McClanahan’s career, even after she had established herself as a successful New York actress, her mom was convinced that this show-business “pipe dream” simply wouldn’t last.
“Even when I was doing plays, my mother didn’t think I had a real job,” McClanahan recalls. “Mother thought that I would get it out of my blood any minute, truly, and that I would come back to Ardmore, Oklahoma, and settle down. She just knew that it would happen.”
That’s not exactly the kind of mom that McClanahan plays to Lisa Hartman Black in the Hallmark Channel Original movie “Back to You & Me.” But it’s near enough that McClanahan, the Emmy-winning “Golden Girls” star, made the connection.
In “Back to You & Me,” Hartman Black plays a successful L.A. doctor who returns to her small-town home for a 20-year high school reunion, renews a romance with her high school flame (played by Dale Midkiff) and patches up an estranged relationship with her mom.
“My mother was always supportive of me, every step of the way, and we never had any kind of falling out,” McClanahan points out. “But she still worried. Every year, she thought it would be the year that I would decide it was time to quit. She finally caught on when I got my first soap opera in 1970. I was on “Another World” and she could tune me in three or four days a week and finally it was okay. But before I was on television, it was all just too vague for her.”
But the fact is that, after landing a key role in the play “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” in 1964, “I’ve been an actress ever since. I haven’t had to be a waitress or be a pharmaceutical company secretary or sell blouses at Robinson’s Department Store.”
And she’s just as busy now at age 70 as ever. She joined the cast of the Broadway musical, “Wicked” in May and still guest stars in TV series like last season’s “Hope & Faith.” “I’m writing a musical with a composer friend of mine and I’m supposed to play Hank Williams’ mother in “Lost Highway,” which they want to take on the road for six months beginning next year. I’m also writing my autobiography. I call it My First Five Husbands and I try to get through at least a chapter a day, although it’s so hard with all these other commitments.”
McClanahan was compelled to costar in “Back to You & Me,” because it was “a sweet little script” that spoke to her. “It’s kind of the best of both worlds,” she says, “because I get to play the comedy relief and still pull some heartstrings in one scene. Because, after all, when your daughter is blaming you for something you haven’t done and hasn’t spoken to you in years, there are some heartstrings to be pulled with that.”
In many ways, her character, Helen, is a classic Rue McClanahan “type” -- a vibrant, exuberant woman. “I liked the fact that the lady I play is the heartbeat of her little town,” McClanahan says. “She’s the one who was getting everyone in town to exercise and cut back on red meat and stop smoking, so they can get recognition as the healthiest little town in America. I like that kind of upbeat, optimistic character.”
McClanahan relishes playing characters that “age gracefully,” like Blanche Devereaux, the man-hungry Southern belle she portrayed in “The Golden Girls” (1985-92). “Aging Gracefully,” as a matter of fact, is the title of a breast-cancer-awareness speech that she often gives. McClanahan successfully battled breast cancer in 1997 and ’98; today, she says, “I’m doing just fine. I couldn’t be better.” The message that the actress shares when she speaks: Whether it’s embarking on an unlikely career or fighting a disease or just growing old with style and dignity, anyone can accomplish just about anything. “But you have to want it,” she says, “and you have to work at it.”
-- HALLMARK CHANNEL --
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