Angels of ER
By Johanna Scheller
Photographs by Mark Seliger

Every now and then it happens. One of the stars of NBC’s megahit medical drama ER--either Sherry Stringfield (who plays the no-nonsense Dr. Susan Lewis) or Julianna Margulies (enigmatic head nurse Carol Hathaway) or Gloria Reuben (sincere physician’s assistant Jeanie Boulet)--will look up in the middle of rehearsing a trauma scene and realize that everyone in the room is a woman. "Chick trauma!" she’ll cry out, and they’ll all join in, "Chick trauma! Chick trauma!"

Tubes are stuck into dummies, blood squirts on cue, background nurses (real ones recruited for authenticity) pass scalpels and start IV drips, as the Steadicam operator snakes among them like a Martha Graham dancer. "Cut! Great!" yells the director. High-fives fill the air.

"Chick traumas are the best traumas," Margulies says. (She’s the one with the 1940’s-movie-star face, all dark eyebrows and slinky curls.) "There’s something different about them: no fooling around, no holdups. We’re more focused. It runs so smooth." The next day they’ll razz their male co-stars, "We did a chick trauma in 45 minutes! You guys couldn’t do that!"

Even the crew has a different vibe," says Stringfield (she’s the Ivory-soap blonde with the whiskey voice; Reuben, who became a series regular this season, is the one with the toast-and-honey skin and the warm smile)

It’s lunchtime on the Warner Bros. lot, and the women are sunning outside the studio commissary, a short walk from Stage 11, where they film the most lauded--and lucrative--drama on television. About 37 million viewers check in to ER every week. Thirty-seven million. Last year, its first on the air, the show vacuumed up 23 Emmy nominations and won 8--tying Hill Street Blues’ record for a freshman series--including Best Supporting Actress for Margulies. This year it snagged everything from Screen Actors Guild trophies to the People’s Choice Award for favorite TV drama.

The ER guys are on the patio, too, just out of earshot: Anthony Edwards, who plays Dr. Mark Greene (the balding, beating heart of the show), is being interviewed by TV Guide. George Clooney (Dr. Doug Ross, the troubled hunk), Eriq La Salle (Dr. Peter Benton, the cocky, angry surgeon) and Noah Wyle (Dr. John Carter, the soulful naif) stretch out at the next table.
Stringfield: They’re looking over here again. This makes them so nervous. If the three of us are ever just sitting on a gurney chatting--
Margulies: They all come up. "What are you talking about? What, what, what? No really, what?"

If the guys are talking together do you do the same? All: [Quick and certain] Nuh-uh. No way.
Stringfield: We’re like, "Shut the door!"
Reuben: Oh, now look. [All the men are staring, frankly curious.]
Stringfield: They’ll be here in a second.
Margulies: Look at Anthony, he’s sticking his tongue out at us. [Edwards grabs his pants as if to moon them.]
All: Come on! Come on!

"But the truth is," Margulies says later, "They are four of the sweetest, most sensitive, vulnerable guys I’ve ever met. There isn’t a lot of ‘We’re the women, you’re the men.’ They all have a real feminine side to them. And we have a real tough side to us. I think we all give each other a reality check."

A reality check. Maybe that’s what those 37 million viewers (split evenly between men and women) respond to week after week. ER’s characters--especially the women--are more complicated, cranky and assertive than most people are allowed to be on series TV. "We care about each of the characters in our ensemble equally," says Lydia Woodward, one of ER’s writer/co-executive producers. "Does that mean the women get more attention than on some shows where they’re not thought of equally? Probably."

The women of ER are heroes to many viewers because they're real. Amid the carnage that is everyday life, they save lives, they ride public transit, they lose lives, their families are screwed up. And at the end of the day, they usually go home alone.

Back on the set, Margulies’ neck is bright red--a homeless character just throttled nurse Carol Hathaway, and she got slugged in the ensuing melee. "There’s so much testosterone out there, they forgot I’m in the middle of it," she says. She smooths her peach-colored scrubs and sighs. "Ehh, peach. It makes me look green. For a while we had these nice maroon scrubs, but Steven Spielberg [ER’s überproducer] said the blood didn’t stand out enough." Spielberg concerns himself with those details? Everyone nods solemnly.

"When I was in college," Margulies continues (she went to Sarah Lawrence), "I would watch All My Children just to laugh. Like, ‘She’s been in bed with him for four or five hours, and her lipstick is perfect.’ You don’t see that on our show. We try to portray these women honestly." Later, when she shoots a bedroom scene--Hathaway and her paramedic boyfriend, Shep (Ron Eldard), waking up in old T-shirts early in the morning--there is no lipstick in sight.

Margulies arrives for tea the next day at Shutters on the Beach, Santa Monica’s version of a rambling New England inn: genteel patrons but without wrinkles. Clouds scud across the ocean outside. She takes off her black beret and pulls her black cashmere turtleneck over her chin. Throughout tea, she’s enthusiastic, eager to communicate, eager to laugh. "The problem is that they keep hooking her up with men," she says. "I think they have a really hard time allowing Hathaway to be Hathaway without a man." Hathaway was resurrected from a suicide drug overdose in ER’s first episode and rode out the season full of Sturm und Drang: a torched love affair with Dr. Doug Ross, a failed stab at adopting an abandoned AIDS child, being stood up at the altar. "The style of the show," George Clooney says, "is, take the lines and throw them away. Don’t fall prey to ‘acting.’ Julianna is a master at it. She carried me on her shoulders for a year."

But this year Hathaway’s inner life has evaporated from the show, and it frustrates Margulies. "[Executive Producer] John Wells says Hathaway’s ratings go up when she’s lighter, and I know they think the show is dark enough. But I think they missed the boat." Instead, she wishes Hathaway’s suicide attempt could be explored further: Why is she so hard on herself? How did she get to that dark place?

Being hard on herself is something Margulies understands. "I set such high standards for myself that I’m always on the edge of panic. I’ve done it ever since childhood," she says. Her mother, an art-and-movement therapist, and her father, an ad executive (he wrote the famous "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz" jingle), divorced when she was young, and her mother moved the family from New York to Paris to London (Margulies, who is 28, has two sisters). "I was always the new kid in town, so I had to exceed to prove myself. And my mother was a hippie, a free spirit. There were no rules, except I wasn’t allowed to watch TV. I think I felt everything was out of control--my parents’ being apart, where we lived. The only thing I could control was my yearning to succeed." She remembers throwing a 50-page, hand-illustrated high school research paper into a mud puddle because it got an A-minus.

The pressure continued at Sarah Lawrence, which Margulies calls "a horrible experience. The women weren’t kind. But I got lost in plays. That saved me." She skipped to Florence, Italy, for her junior year, to study Dante, and spent her senior year off campus at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, researching her art-history degree.

Margulies still keeps an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side; she and her actor boyfriend, whom she won’t name (although he’s reported to be the aforementioned Ron Eldard), commute back and forth, ringing up air miles like cherries on a slot machine. Over Christmas she starred in the film The Traveler, with Bill Paxton, and she recently jetted off to London to audition for the screen adaptation of Henry James’ Wings of a Dove. Her life, she says, isn’t lacking a thing. So why isn’t Margulies satisfied?

"I just see every step as the next step to the next step. I don’t know how to enjoy where I am yet," she says. I try to be a positive person, to find the good in any situation. I can’t imagine having such a high expectations of myself and being negative. I definitely wouldn’t have lasted." She laughs. "I’m slowly progressing into just accepting who I am."