It’s pretty meta that I’m sitting with an actor who’s the epitome of Upper East Side sophistication in a hotel that’s the epitome of Upper East Side sophistication. But then some Wednesdays are better than others.
Christine Baranski shows up for lunch at the Mark looking like a million bucks, wearing a belted black Michael Kors pantsuit and blue-tinted Robert Marc sunglasses, every hair of her highlighted bob in place, her make-up perfect. In fact, she looks exactly like the prototypical New York society woman drawn on the hotel’s coasters, except without the designer dog tucked under her arm.
At 70, Baranski is busier than ever. She has wrapped up the sixth and final season of Robert and Michelle King’s The Good Fight, a spin-off of The Good Wife. The show has continued the adventures of the liberal Chicago lawyer Diane Lockhart, now working at a prestigious, predominantly Black law firm. But The Good Fight has a more madcap feel – as if everyone’s about to break out in song – blending fantasy and current events with fun guest stars playing real luminaries or thinly veiled ones. Diane becomes a conspiring leader of the resistance against Donald J Trump.
The beginning of the end starts streaming in the United States this Thursday, on Paramount+. She is also filming the second season of Julian Fellowes’ frock opera The Gilded Age. And on her breaks from TV, she has been studying TE Lawrence and Oscar Wilde at Oxford University.
Now her biggest ambition, she jokes, is to play the Fool to Meryl Streep’s Lear.
She could do it. She has theatre chops and went to Juilliard in a golden era that produced Robin Williams, Patti LuPone, Kevin Kline and Mandy Patinkin. “I wasn’t movie-star beautiful,” she says, “which is probably why I didn’t aspire to be a film actress.” But she became a TV star in her 40s and wowed fans with her comedy skills in movies like The Birdcage, Bowfinger and Mamma Mia! (not to mention Broadway’s farcical Boeing-Boeing).
Baranski is a throwback to those 1940s actresses like Rosalind Russell and Eve Arden who could be campy and glamorous, cutting and moving, wicked and loyal, all at the same time. In other words, the perfect best friend.
‘She has a little Elaine Stritch in her’
“I live on the Upper East Side, but I don’t usually look like this,” she says apologetically, explaining that she has just come from “fluffing and glossing” for a photo shoot.
I don’t believe her, of course. Her costars have already told me that she is enviably meticulous. “We’d be flying to the Emmys, and I’d look over and she’d be there, lipstick perfect, those long legs, crowned with that gorgeous mop of hair, reading the New York Times,” says Julianna Margulies, who starred with Baranski in The Good Wife.
Cynthia Nixon plays Baranski’s younger, meeker sister in The Gilded Age, and nearly 39 years ago she played her teenage daughter in the original Broadway production of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, directed by Mike Nichols. (Baranski won a Tony for that role.) “She’s a little girl from Buffalo, but she always seems like she dropped in from Paris,” Nixon says. “She’s such a citizen of the world. She never stops cultivating her garden, whether she’s reading, researching, working on her instrument – that amazing body.”
Meryl Streep, who appeared with Baranski in two Mamma Mia! movies, chimes in about her 5-foot-10 friend: “Her posture is like a queen.” Baranski says merely, “I do Pilates and I’m moderate in my habits. I have good genes.”
As someone who’s perennially messy, I’m fascinated by women who never leave the house looking less than perfect, as if they just pulled everything they’re wearing from a tissue-laden box. (My sister is like that.)
I lean over to examine Baranski more carefully and figure out how she does it. But I knock over the pitcher of cream for her coffee, which spills all over her side of the table and drips toward her black suit. Without missing a beat, she covers the mess with a napkin and keeps talking about Tom Stoppard.
She is also the type who would never miss a performance or show up not knowing her lines. Once, before she opened at the Kennedy Center, in Washington, DC, in the title role of the musical Mame, she slipped and fell on a New York sidewalk and broke her right kneecap. (She jokingly renamed the show Maimed.) But by opening night, two months later, she still managed to dance and sweep up and down the grand staircase.
[ If I angle my screen, no one can see I'm watching Mamma Mia!Opens in new window ]
Not to say that the actor is as starchy as Agnes van Rhijn, her character in The Gilded Age, a fearsome figure who, not unlike Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey, can level you with one put-down or averted gaze. That’s a type that Julian Fellowes, the creator of both shows, calls “sardonic old survivors”, matriarchs trying to hold up the slipping standards of society.
Unlike Aunt Agnes, Baranski has been known to have nude swimming parties in the moonlight at her lake house in Connecticut with fellow actors like Mark Rylance and Cherry Jones. “There is indeed lovely bacchanalian behaviour, but nothing untoward,” she says. “I think Cherry in particular just doesn’t care if she swims naked in the day or the night.”
“Christine exudes class and grace, but she can throw back a martini, eat a hot dog and talk sports with the best of them,” Margulies says.
Baranski is an opera aficionado and a devout Buffalo Bills fan, with a T-shirt that says “Buffalo, a drinking town with a football problem”. And as for her martinis, she says, she likes Grey Goose with a twist – and vermouth just as “an afterthought”. She stops at one and a half, unable to keep up with her character in the 1990s sitcom Cybill, Maryann Thorpe, who was fabulously dressed, politically incorrect and never without her favourite accessory: a martini.
A typical conversation between Cybill and Maryann:
Cybill: “You know what is amazing, Maryann?”
Maryann: “They make vodka from wheat!”
Although the two women had great on-air chemistry, Cybill Shepherd – on whom the show was based – addressed off-air tensions in her memoir, writing that she found Baranski standoffish. People connected to the show tell me that the fact that Baranski won an Emmy for her role and Shepherd did not contributed to the tensions, and Shepherd wrote, “the grain of truth in this controversy was that of course I was envious. Who doesn’t want to win an Emmy?”
Tom Werner, one of the show’s producers, brushes off the criticism of Baranski. “She wasn’t snobby,” he tells me. “She was brilliant.”
Baranski says, “Can you believe that still comes up? People still want to know.” She declines to discuss Shepherd further.
Maryann was so popular that Baranski shied away from tippling roles afterward, for fear of getting typecast. “When I’m asked to pose for pictures,” she says, “I never pose with a drink in my hand.”
Michael Kahn, who taught Baranski acting at Juilliard, gives her high praise, saying, “She plays somebody who’s tipsy better than anyone I know.” It’s easier for women to be funny acting drunk than men, Baranski says.
“She has a little Elaine Stritch in her,” says Streep, whose daughter, Mamie Gummer, worked with Baranski in The Good Fight and whose youngest daughter, Louisa Jacobson, plays the ingenue in The Gilded Age. (Streep had to break the news to Baranski that Jacobson is “terrified” of her when she’s in character as Aunt Agnes.)
Margulies recalls that once, when she and Baranski were walking to see a Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, they were accosted by a gang of autograph seekers. Baranski drew herself up to her full height, surveyed the group, told the ringleader with asperity, “Oh, no, darling, don’t be silly,” and kept walking.
‘Twelfth night’ and witchy baths
Baranski’s grandparents were immigrants who had been stage actors in their native Poland. She grew up in a blue-collar Polish American neighbourhood in a suburb of Buffalo, in New York State. Her father, who died when she was eight, edited a Polish-language newspaper, and her mother had a job ordering parts for air-conditioning factories.
Baranski went to a Catholic girls’ school, so we swap stories about scary nuns. In high school, she adopted a grander way of speaking, akin to Madonna’s odd English accent. “I think I decided I didn’t want to sound like a Buffalo girl,” Baranski recalls, “and people would ask me, ‘Are you English?’ I’d say, ‘No, I’m just affected.’”
She had trouble with the sibilant “S” and was rejected from the Juilliard School she first auditioned. After she capped her two front teeth – “I had a gap like Lauren Hutton’s, but not as beautiful” – and took speech lessons, the drama school let her audition again, with a page full of S’s. She did a speech of Viola’s from Twelfth Night, but mispronounced Viola.
“It’s Vy-ola,” a judge on the faculty boomed. “Vee-ola is the instrument. Wrong department.”
Baranski jokes that she was admitted “by the skin of my teeth”.
Then, maybe just to show them, she won acclaim starring in a cascade of “S” productions: Shakespeare, Stoppard, Sondheim, Neil Simon, Cybill Shepherd and The Simpsons.
She was married for 30 years to the actor Matthew Cowles, until his death in 2014. He had a long recurring role on All My Children as Billy Clyde Tuggle. “He was a white-trash pimp and he wrote his own material,” Baranski says. “They took him off the air for a while because Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority were cleaning up television, and he had to go.”
She once did a guest appearance with him. “Ten days after having my firstborn, we agreed to be on a plotline where I was Billy Clyde’s white-trash girlfriend living in a trailer park,” she says. “He and I kidnapped one of the leading characters. Please promise me you won’t look it up. It’s so bad that it’s kind of great.”
She gives her husband credit for handling it well when she gained more star wattage. “It was so hard,” she says, her voice wavering. “I was on the red carpet at an Emmy event, and we were standing together and a photographer shouted out, ‘Get out of the way. You’re standing in her light.’ And he did. He was such a big-hearted man. He was really happy for me and proud of me.”
They had two daughters: Isabel, who has a law degree and is a writer, and Lily, an actor who just produced her own film, a surreal short about a woman who loses her teeth, one by one.
Her friends rave about Baranski’s dedication as a mother, noting she flew back on a red eye from Los Angeles to Connecticut every weekend when she was filming Cybill. And they are amazed at the flair she puts into being a grandmother to three boys.
King, the Good Fight cocreator, marvels at how Baranski would not simply bathe her grandchildren: “She bathes them outdoors and pretends to be a witch and throws a cauldron of water on them and cackles.”
“I’m a terrifying, wonderful witch,” the actor says brightly. “My mission is to keep them away from screens, because when we raised our girls in Connecticut there was no TV in the house. I know children can have happy childhoods without being mesmerised and stupefied by screens.” (Maybe she’s drawing from her own admitted overdosing on MSNBC in the Trump era.)
King says that Baranski was also nurturing to the crew. “If somebody needs help, she is just going to quietly give it,” she says, adding that when one crew member was injured and couldn’t work for months, Baranski was one of the people who gave him money “so he could continue to have food on the table”.
‘Thank God for Pilates and talcum powder’
When The Good Fight began, the Kings assumed that Hillary Clinton would be president. In the middle of filming the pilot, they had to retool. The show began with an opening shot of Diane Lockhart, in a black dress and pearls, with her mouth hanging open, watching Trump’s inauguration. Now Diane is contending with the jaw-dropping idea that he may be announcing another run for president (if he’s not in jail).
“Six years later, can you believe that this guy is still in our brains, taking up all this real estate?” Baranski says, biting into a cookie. She blames the news media in large part. “Everything he said was covered, every outrageous thing,” she says. “It gave him so much traction.”
The show wades into thorny racial issues, depicting a power struggle between Diane and black partners who do not want her at the top of the firm because of her race.
The Kings were so impressed with Baranski’s ability to be sexy throughout her 60s that, for the final season, they have put her character in a romantic triangle with two men, Diane’s Republican husband (played by Gary Cole) and a doctor (played by John Slattery) who gives her microdoses of a hallucinogen to help her deal with the stress of voting rights being threatened and Roe being overturned).
Baranski says she gushed to King: “My God, I’ve just had the most wonderful day at work. I was in bed between Gary Cole and John Slattery.”
In one scene in season four, Diane got dolled up in a black vinyl dominatrix catsuit for her husband, Kurt, a taciturn conservative who works for the Trump administration and the NRA, and who goes big-game hunting with the Trump sons and gets shot, Dick Cheney-style.
“Thank God for Pilates and talcum powder,” Baranski says drily. “It took four dressers and a lot of talc to get me in and out. This outfit deserves more than one orgasm.”
Though Kurt’s political ideology causes Diane agita, she is determined to reach across the chasm. When he is dubious about the dominatrix outfit, she switches to “an NRA Barbie” look, adding a cowboy hat and a rifle. “It’s a way of keeping things lively in the bedroom,” Baranski explains, “since they dare not talk politics in the diningroom.”
Mo Rocca, who has guest starred on The Good Fight, tells me: “You don’t think, ‘This is sexy for an older couple.’ You just think it’s sexy. She’s getting better as she gets older, which I think is really cool.”
In an era when many college students polled say they would refuse to share a dorm or go on a date with a student from the opposite party, Diane and Kurt seem to be the only red-blue blend in America that’s working.
Diane consults with the ghost of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, complete with the white lace collar on her black robe – played by the wonderful Elaine May – to get advice on how she managed to maintain a friendship with Justice Antonin Scalia.
The Ginsburg ghost tells Diane that Justice Scalia teased her and made her laugh and cooked “amazing” pasta, adding, “life is too short to fight over everything.”
In one particularly inventive episode, the Kings conjured an It’s a Wonderful Life-style world, where Diane is knocked out and thinks her idol, Clinton, has won the election. Diane is shocked to learn her firm is representing Harvey Weinstein because there has been no #MeToo movement; the women he attacked were too afraid to come forward, given that President Hillary Clinton has given the predator and donor the presidential medal of freedom. But, on the positive side, the polar bear population is expanding.
“One of the great things about that character,” Baranski says of Diane, “is that she was never portrayed as a victim. I don’t like playing victims. I’d be terrible as the long-suffering wife.” She says that’s also why she liked playing Maryann Thorpe, who “had her three-martini lunches and then planned creative revenge on her ex-husband.”
I ask Baranski about her Tiffany’s window of laughs. She has about 12 different ones, all sparkling – ranging from sultry to sarcastic to can-you-believe-Donald-Trump-might-run-again? “I like to be known for my laugh,” Baranski says. “My laugh and my legs, that would be my legacy. Laugh, legs, legacy. I always said if I could be photographed from the waist down, I’d have a great film career.”
Confirm or Deny
Maureen Dowd: You were named Miss Kielbasa in 1970.
Christine Baranski: No, but I did get the Polish Ham Award and was sent a ham.
Dowd: You gave Elon Musk the hairy eyeball at the Met Gala.
Baranski: My daughters gave me a photo of it as a Mother’s Day present. I don’t know him. It just makes me angry that billionaires spend all their money trying to get to space when there’s so much work to do down here.
Dowd: Losing to Maggie Smith at the 2012 Emmys was one of your major career achievements.
Baranski: The idea of Maggie Smith as a supporting actress really is laughable. She’s my idol. I saw Laurence Olivier’s Othello in downtown Buffalo and this actress named Maggie Smith was playing Desdemona. I followed her career. I think she’s just the consummate technician.
Dowd: You were excited to do a scene with your crush Colin Firth in Mamma Mia!
Baranski: I was in a red Norma Kamali bathing suit floating in a little water dinghy. We were out at sea, and so I had him all to myself. And it was one of those wonderful moments where you think, “I can’t believe I’m doing this.” I love Englishmen. I think I was British in a former life.
Dowd: When you worked with Cher in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, she called you “a high-kicking b**ch”.
Baranski: Yes, how great is that?
Dowd: When Tom Stoppard did the play Hapgood, you tried for a part.
Baranski: The play is about quantum physics. I wrote him a note: “Dear Tom, I hear you’ve written a play about quantum physics. Is there a particle for me?”
Dowd: You’d stand in zero-degree weather if it meant you got to watch the Buffalo Bills beat the New England Patriots.
Baranski: Absolutely. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times
