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| allure magazine, september 1999 |
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Next spring, JULIANNA MARGULIES is pulling the plug on her Emmy-winning stint on the top-rated ER. Did she forget to
take her meds?
IT'S NEARING MIDNIGHT ON one of those hazy, blistering, Summer of Sam sort of Manhattan nights.
It's mostly lunatics, unfazed visitors from equatorial nations, and anxious young actresses teetering up Broadway
on pimp-sized Clydesdales who are willing to wander any distance from air-conditioned sanity.
Julianna Margulies--ER's sultry, complex Nurse Carol Hathaway--is scouring the Upper West Side for tomorrow's
daily papers, which will carry reviews of Off Broadway's bash, starring Margulies's longtime boyfriend, Ron
Eldard. "Ron won't read the reviews of his work," Margulies, 30, is saying. "He doesn't want to alter his performance for a
review. I respect that tremendously. But with an amazing review--
"Oooh!" she shrieks, cringing in horror. Not five feet from Margulies, a woman in her 60s has tripped over the curb and
gone down with a leaden thud. The woman grimaces in pain, her foot twisted sideways like the head of a five-iron. A
small crowd gathers to help. "Is she OK?" Margulies asks in pained sympathy, leaning in toward the woman. A moment
later, however, the woman is up and shaking it off. She's been downgraded from critical, to the relief of every-one
watching--particularly Marguiles, television's most famous trauma nurse. "That would be just what I need," she
chuckles nervously. "I jump in there and there's nothing I can do."
While it would take a severe case of cathode poisoning to approach, say, Ally McBeal's Calista Flockhart at Spa-go
and ask her to litigate a postcollision whiplash suit, it somehow seems less than delusional to expect another small
miracle of medical compassion from Margulies, a woman who got her RN from Soundstage University.
Some actors, after all, have a hard time shaking a typecast. And then there's Julianna Margulies. Carol
Hathaway has become Margulies's psychic Siamese twin, the other self hidden in her skull. Margulies has lived as
Hathaway for five years, 24 episodes a year. As Hathaway, she has survived a near suicide and George Clooney. And as
Hathaway, she's won an Emmy (the only member of ER's splendid cast to do so). For a while it got really weird:
Marguiles and Hathaway were seeing the same man (Ron Eldard played Shep, a paramedic, in the
second season). "Let's face it. My life isn't my life without her," she says. But
soon that will change. Twenty-four 44-minute episodes and Carol Hathaway will be nothing but a rerun.
It's a tough gig to walk away from. Margulies is well aware that you don't leave a number one show without taking on
some Shelley Long-scale career risks. But the sense of discovery just wasn't there after five long seasons. She
didn't spend all that time around the intensive care unit and not learn when you have to pull the plug.
"It's grueling and exciting and thrilling work--but after a certain amount of time, you know your character so well
there's not a lot of prep work you need to do," Marguiles says. "I think it's going to hit me really hard my last
week on ER. I mean, these are people who are my family--not just the actors but the crew. These guys come to my home.
We do yoga together on Sundays, me and the camera guys."
But if Margulies is going to miss assuming the Warrior position alongside a couple of sweaty key grips, she can be
assured that the show's 40 million addicts will certainly miss her, too. ER, with its gyrating camera and icy, ironic attitudes,
reinvented hospital melodrama--a genre on life support--for the dot-com age. The show has been a laboratory for
strong-womanhood. Margulies's Hathaway has persevered through more internal conflicts than the former Yugoslavia.
Those signature eyebrows radiate more strength than some infantry platoons. Overworked, sleepless, and besieged by
the modern female perfectionist impulse to avoid every single professional and romantic mistake of all women
throughout human history, these self-possessed women take no guff from the boys and no backseat to them, but manage
to remain tender and even sexy--every Thursday night. "One of the reasons it took me so long to really make the
decision to leave," says Margulies, "was that my boyfriend said to me, 'Think about what films you've seen this year
and what female characters could even hold a pinkie up to Hathaway.' It scared the shit out of me. Everyone is just
'the girlfriend of.'"
But despite this polemical talk, it seems almost strange to spend time with Margulies and find her playful and wildly
life-affirming, to an almost Age of Aquarius degree. Margulies, channeling Hathaway, seems as if she could
communicate a stanza of Milton through a curl of her lips and a moody flip of her curly, black-coffee hair. Margulies
herself, though, is the perfect chatterbox who punctuates her sentences with laughs.
Before ER taping begins in August, she's pouring her energy into a tiny, talky, experimental play that will run for two
weeks at Vassar College. After ER wraps for the 1999-2000 season, Margulies has agreed to do a movie set in
turn-of-the-century Vienna and directed by Bruce Beresford, who directed Margulies alongside Glenn Close in 1997's Paradise
Road.
Margulies grew up in the consummate "enlightened" household of the '70s. The three Margulies sisters--Julianna was the
youngest, the "easy" child--ate high-fiber foods, performed little rhyming plays, and never, ever watched television.
"[ would go to friends' houses," she says, "and I wouldn't even want to play with them. I was like, 'Are you kidding?
I want to watch Gilligan's Island.' I'd go into their cupboard and find Frosted Flakes!" She gasps in mock
horror: "'Are you aware that you have sugar in your house?!'" Julianna--whose first words, her mother tells her, were
"Leave me alone"--did encounter certain crises. "I had big cheeks. In England and Paris, it was just the worst. Women
would come up and attack me on the street, pinching my fat cheeks. My first French word, apparently, was
'Arret!' 'Stop!'"
Marguiles eventually went off to that incubator of the creative impulse, Sarah Lawrence, Yoko Ono's alma mater.
With a degree in art history, Marguiles earned up to $200 a night waiting tables at 150 Wooster, a hot New York
nightspot. Before long, she was bagging coveted roles, including one in Jon Robin Baitz's Substance of Fire. Then,
in 1994, Margulies read for a new hospital drama. She was, of course, supposed to be good, but not so good they
couldn't kill her off in the pilot. Margulies was sensational.
Believably or not, of course, Margulies insists she's no classic beauty. "I have a wide face," she says. "I'm pale
as a sheet. My one religious thing is sunscreen--in the winter, summer, spring, and fall, every day." Other-wise,
"sleep, exfoliant at night, and then in the morning I use a Yon-Ka mask. Put a mask on in the morning, brush my teeth
in the morning, the mask hardens, wash it off. Put Crime de la Mer on for the day, and I'm done." Yoga works out the
kinks after a 14-hour day on the set and, Margulies insists, even has some beauty benefits: "I can tell you the best
facial you'll ever get is a shoulder stand."
Margulies, strolling amid sweat-soaked New Yorkers up Broadway, suddenly spots a Dr. Ruth-size woman seated on
the sidewalk with an upended cardboard box serving as a table. "Free palm reading," the woman's sign says. One problem:
The free palm reading is $10. Margulies pulls out a crisp Alexander Hamilton. Suddenly the free palm reading is $20.
"Forget it," she says. Marguiles snatches the bill and walks away. "You almost have to respect that, in a weird
way," she says of the woman's chutzpah. She breaks into that dreamy Margulies chuckle. It's a laugh, but there's
some substance there beneath it. "You know," she says, "I really didn't want to know what's going to happen that far
in the future, anyway."
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