Christine Baranski is obviously a patient woman, After all, she endured two seasons as Cybill Shepherd's party-hearty sidekick on the famously tumultuous sitcom "Cybill." But the Tony and Emmy Award-winning actress had to put up with a whole new kind of trial for director Ron Howard in Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
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"Ron asked if I would be uncomfortable sitting in a makeup chair for three or four hours," recalls Baranski, who plays Martha, a woman torn between her husband, the mayor of Whoville (Jeffrey Tarnbor), and Jim Carrey's evil Grinch. "I said no." But after nine trips from her Connecticut home to Los Angeles in five months for testing with makeup master Rick Baker, she discovered that Howard had downplayed the demands.
"I think my eye makeup alone--I have emeralds on my eye-lids--initially took an hour, Sometimes my set calls were 3:30 in the morning." But Baranski says she loved playing a Who in conflict. "Martha has a very deep place in her heart for the Grinch who was once a grammar school sweetheart of hers," she reveals. "When the Grinch gets into town, he bounces off a few things and lands on my heaving bosom. That was really fun to do."
A vet of such movies as The Ref, Bowfinger and Cruel Intentions, Baranski is used to playing formidable female characters, like her role as a TV producer on her current CBS show "Welcome to New York." "I hate to call the women I've played larger than life, because my life is pretty large," she notes. "They're theatrical, which is something I can do very easily." She credits her grandmother, with whom she shared a bedroom as a child, as the inspiration for her grande dame characters. "My grandma was a bit of a diva, and when you have that impression from your youth, it just hides there in your psyche and you can pull it out." But she also knows when to put it away. "Back home I go by my married name of Cowles. I lead a very real life: raking my kids to school, running errands and being a mom. But," she adds, "I must say I've loved the roles I've played in my career. How cool is it to play the diva?"
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Jeffrey Epstein