Oak Hills grad ready for sitcom Wednesday, July 29, 1998
BY JOHN KIESEWETTER
The Cincinnati Enquirer
PASADENA, Calif. -- Oak Hills High School graduate Jenny Robertson thought she was prepared to answer any question about Maggie Winters, her first TV sitcom, at her first ever press conference.
Robertson
Honestly, she didn't expect to be asked: So do you look forward to having many babies?
"Me? No!" replied the actress, who is single and childless.
The question came up at the TV critics' Summer Press Tour here because Ms. Robertson, 34, plays Maggie's best friend, the mother of three children. Faith Ford (Corky Sherwood on Murphy Brown) stars as the title character.
"That was an odd question, wasn't it?" Ms. Robertson said after the CBS press conference.
But she didn't mind. She was just happy to be there. Happy to have landed her first network series, after not making it on three previous pilots. Happy to have an acting job after the frustrating grind of Hollywood auditions since moving here from New York 13 months ago.
Breakthrough to comedy
And she was thrilled to have made the breakthrough to comedy from the serious drama she had done, starting at the Actors Theatre of Louisville after graduating from Northern Kentucky University in 1986.
The Bridgetown native made her feature film debut 10 years ago in Bull Durham, as the flirtatious Millie.
She has a feature film, A Cool, Dry Place, due out this fall, in which Cincinnati native Todd Louiso plays her lover.
The 1982 Oak Hills graduate also has starred in Heart of Dixie, Family of Spies, Danielle Steel's Message from Nam and the Lifetime cable remake of Notorious.
"I can cry, so they cast me in anything where you have to weep and be depressed. I know it's going to be good for me to be doing this happy stuff, as opposed to a Danielle Steel miniseries where every day I had to cry over 10 different things."
She won the part of Robin Foster because Maggie Winters creator Kari Lizer wanted "people who can act and make a character humorous," instead of "sitcom acting," the actress said.
Robin, a happily married character with a family (ages 4, 2 and newborn), represents the dream life for Maggie, who slinks home to tiny Shelbyville, Ind., to start over again after a messy divorce. Ms. Lizer selected Shelbyville (population 15,633) because she wanted it set in a small Midwest area that would "feel like Anytown, U.S.A."
Ms. Robertson decided to pursue acting after her stage debut in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit at Oak Hills.
"I certainly never thought as a child I'd be good at acting. I'm very, very bashful. I think a lot of shy people love acting, because you get to be somebody else."
It could be argued that her first acting job was as an Oak Hills cheerleader her sophomore and junior years, when she wasn't waitressing at Frisch's on Glenway Avenue.
Cheerleading "was just something to do. It's like a role you play," she said. "I had no interest in sports, or supporting sports."
Louisville apprenticeship
After her one-year apprenticeship in Louisville, she moved to New York and soon won the role of Susan Sarandon's sidekick in Bull Durham. The next 10 years, she learned the hard way that an actor's life wasn't as glamorous as some people think.
"It's a weird profession. When you're working, it's the most exciting thing in the world. And when you're not -- I've sometimes gone two years without working -- you get so bored," she said.
"When you don't get hired over and over, there is the sense of "Am I ever going to work again? Am I a terrible actress? Should I be doing something different?' Or that you're hideously ugly. So there's a sigh of relief when you get hired, and you can say, "I guess I am an OK actress.' "
For 13 weeks she'll have a job on a sitcom, even though she doesn't consider herself a funny girl. "No, but I get tickled when people laugh at me," she said.
She's not thinking about having the last laugh on her agent, who wouldn't submit her name for TV comedies. She's just looking forward to her first laughs on Maggie Winters in September.
Enquirer TV critic John Kiesewetter is reporting from the Summer Press Tour.