Sela Acts Her Age

By Bob Spitz

SEXY AND SERENE, THE STAR OF "ONCE AND AGAIN"

HOLLYWOOD WISDOM DICTATES THAT WOMEN WHO reach the age of 40 had better hope they receive the scripts rejected by Dame Judi Dench. On-screen, unfortunately, women have no middle age—they're either babes or distinguished old birds. Sela Ward knows the routine. Four years ago, at the age of 40, she auditioned for the role of a James Bond girl, only to be told she was 10 years too late. To make matters worse, she watched her male contemporaries—stars like Michael Douglas and Kevin Costner—prance around on-screen playing romantic leads. It was an inequity that made her, she says, both depressed and resentful.

Since then, Ward, 44, has become Hollywood's poster girl for midlife sexiness. As Lily Manning, on ABC-TV's groundbreaking hit series "Once and Again," in which she plays a middle-aged, divorced mom—and very much a babe, at that—she makes the case for women that maybe the 40s really are the wonder years. Who says life has no second acts? Last month Ward won the Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for the role. It was her second Emmy; she won her first for her role as Teddy in the long-running NBC-TV series "Sisters."

Ward, now the national spokesperson for the telecommunications company Sprint, is rising in the public consciousness. As "Once and Again" cranks up for a second emotional year, she is savoring her newfound stardom and all its tinseled trimmings, while making sure she still has time to spend with her husband, Howard Elliot Sherman, and two children, Austin Ward and Stella Raye. The show has broadened her offers, and even serious film roles are pouring in. But as she tells this Sky writer, the real payoff is finally being able to act her age.

Sky: Considering the way Hollywood disposes of actresses once they hit 30, were you at all hesitant to take on a defining role that depicted a woman in her 40s?

Ward: No, I'm a big believer in owning your age so that you can really live authentically. To try to pretend I'm not in my 40s and that I'm still in my 30s, even though I might get away with it for another year or so, doesn't serve me. Given that there are only so many plum roles available for women past the age of 30—or 25, really—I didn't think hard about it. Besides, the material was so compelling that I couldn't walk away from it.

What's the one thing that women in their 40s worry too much about?

How they look—and I'm just as guilty. I always think, "Damn! Look at all that sagging and those lines!" But then I try to assure myself that I had my moment with no lines and a tight little figure. This happens to be the time in life when you realize things start to fall apart. I was just talking to Linda Evans ["Dynasty"] and she said, "I've read where you talk about your 40s being wonderful. And they are—until you hit 47, and then everything just starts to fall apart." But I am having more fun and feel better about myself now than at any other time in my life, so talk to me when I'm 47.

How is that distorted by the focus of Hollywood, where women and child actors share the fear of growing up?

There's just so much pressure in this youth-oriented society to maintain "forever young," but, really, it goes against the laws of nature. When they're retouching a 17-year-old model's body, there is nothing real for kids to aspire to; what they're aspiring to is something that doesn't even exist. That's why I'm a big believer in owning my age, and in magazines putting older people in their ads. If we gave people something else to look at, we'd be putting a new and different face on age. The 40s, 50s, even the 60s are not what they used to be. It's a whole different world. People are taking better care of themselves, they exercise, they eat right, they stay out of the sun. They don't age as dramatically, and so their spirits are much more youthful.

I'm fascinated by what "Once and Again" says about society, and how it might affect people who watch it—people who find themselves in similar circumstances to those of the characters.

I love what the show says. I think it's so relevant to what's going on culturally—particularly in this country, where the divorce rate is so astoundingly high. I think it speaks to a lot of people in a way that's not trite. I know that people look at it to glean, perhaps, a clue to their own similar situation. I'll read fan mail or run into people who say they are going through the same thing and watch not only for comfort but perhaps for some incidental guidance. And that's when I realize how many people we touch, on so many different levels. You know, so many of life's situations seem mundane, but we treat them in just a little bit of a more interesting way, and so it has an effect on those people going through the same things.

Your major television roles haven't exactly been textbook homemakers. First you played a recovering alcoholic, and now a divorced, single, sexy mom.

It's funny, because with "Sisters," I was first offered the role of Frankie, the corporate-type daughter. I'd played similar parts in Nothing in Common and Hello Again, and didn't want to continue in the same tame vein. So I auditioned for Teddy. It was about choice and the time to take a big risk. I was looking for something that helped me show a different color, so to speak. And, truthfully, that role gave me a lot of courage. There were just so many things I had to go through with that character: a husband blowing up in a car, a drunk shooting up a wedding. Things would terrify me on the page, when I got the script, and I'd have to figure out how to do them as truthfully as possible. So by the time I finished that show, I had the confidence to say, "There's nothing you could hand me that I couldn't do now."

Is Lily Manning that much of a challenge?

She's different. The thing that's so great about the role is that it allows me to show the best parts of me as an actress. It's close enough to the world I live in that I'm not always having to stretch—to conjure up something I have no concept of.

Why were you the right actress for this role?

From the moment I read the pilot script, there were so many things that touched my life. In one of [Lily's] first [monologues], she says, "I always just wanted to be safe." And that's a real common theme in my own life.

Every decision I've made was always that, from what kind of car I buy to what I eat for dinner. She eventually says, "I thought I was picking safe men, but they never really were." Things like that I could definitely relate to. I so understood her the way she was written. All the quirks about her—her neuroses, not being sure of herself and at the same time being strong and a smart woman, yet not being on top of everything, she never had it all together—those things struck a chord and appealed to me.

Do you think "Once and Again" is doing its share to promote equality of the sexes?

Yeah! Particularly through Lily, you get to see a woman grow beyond her own self-imposed limitations, out from under the thumb of a domineering husband and really coming into her own. How far they'll go with that, I don't know, but it's certainly not a show about a woman stuck in her own doo-doo.

Is that one area in which you'd like to see them do more?

No, and I'll tell you why. We have two very enlightened people in control of the show [executive producers Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz], very liberal people, and I don't think they would ever make a conscious choice to take her backwards in what is available to women, other than to make a specific point.

As you said, your producers' politics are very liberal, which certainly resonates in the show. How does that affect your mixed bag of viewers?

They sure didn't like seeing Billy's bum [referring to a scene with co-star Billy Campbell, who plays Lily's love interest Rick Sammler] in the second episode. I think we lost a million viewers over that. We live in a very conservative country and have viewers who see the world in black-and-white ways. I read the message boards [on ABC's Web site abc.go.com] for "Once and Again" and see the overwhelming fundamental—even fanatical—response of people who are offended that a couple is having sex outside of marriage; they resent that she's not divorced yet, she's more into her personal life than her kids, all of the most clichéd responses. On the other hand, we get very sophisticated responses from people who feel that anyone critical of the show's morals has the choice to turn the channel.

Because "Once and Again" deals with such a huge menu of family, relationships and issues, is there one aspect of Lily's personality that rankles your husband?

[Laughs] Yeah, he actually watches his wife fold laundry! He's never seen her do that before. Sorry, but I'd rather starve, eating peanut butter and jelly every meal, than do the laundry. Otherwise, there's nothing else about her that really irritates him.

How did growing up in Mississippi affect your life today?

It gave me a very solid foundation, feet planted firmly on the ground. I grew up in a small town of 50,000 [people] in the South, and it's a vantage point I could never have gotten from a larger city. It's enriched the reservoir I draw from. I know what it feels like and smells like to walk into an old country house and sit on the porch and just talk. Often, I'll go into a restaurant that's been there since the 1800s and recognize the same guy behind the counter who was there when I was a kid. It's that sense of community and continuity that I don't think you get in larger cities.

What's our biggest misconception about a place like Mississippi?

Stereotypes—that everybody is racist and uneducated, which is certainly not true. There are incredibly sophisticated, well-traveled, highly evolved people, just like anywhere else. Unfortunately, you don't get that view of that part of the country, because people are busy readdressing so much deplorable history. And rightly so—we should never forget. But they are things of a time gone by. Mississippi has made many strides and, while it is not perfect, the people there—black, white, Indian—are pretty incredible. There is a flavor to it that you can't even describe.

Oh, please—give it a shot.

There's a generosity that people have that you don't see in other places. The South is kind of like a country within a country—they have very particular foods, it's so hot and subtropical, and it gives you sounds and smells and bugs and screened porches and iced tea and slow-moving, slow-talking people that make it so rich and appealing. Every time I go there, I never want to come back [to L.A.]. You get out of the car and the first thing you smell is that rich soil, the pine trees, the magnolias and gardenias and honeysuckle, and [you hear] the cicadas in the evening.

Say no more. If you hadn't become an actress, where else might you have been headed?

I was torn between fine arts and advertising. I actually went to New York, where I was drawing storyboards and learning to produce audiovisual shows, but I quickly segued into the modeling world because it paid 50 times more and I wanted to live there on anything but a shoestring budget.

I imagine that your recent Emmy will do a bit to fatten the purse. To say the least.

At least I'll never have to fold the laundry again__Delta-Sky (October, 2000)