Jean Smart's 'jeanabirth': when having a successful 40-year career is not incompatible with resurfacing in a big way

Some veteran actors live with an ambivalent fame, which is fed

together with that of the younger fans who have just discovered them and assume that their celebrity was born with their discovery.

But only one has given rise to a word to define this situation.

The

of Jean Smart, 71, a term invented by the American press, explains just that: the situation that has caused the resurgence of an actress who has been earning her living and recognition in acting mainly through television for forty years. .

Her second Emmy for giving life to Deborah Vance, the protagonist of the comedy

, comes to endorse this phenomenon.

To understand it, you have to start at the beginning.

Jean Smart was born and raised in Seattle (USA), in a middle class family.

Her father was a high school teacher and her mother, who had grown up poor during the Depression, wanted to be an architect, but it took her six years longer than usual to get into school because she had to combine it with work, and finally , with the pressure of dedicating himself to his house, he ended up giving up his vocation and studying the history of clothing.

Thanks to the work of her father, who shared a high school with Earl Kelly, a mentor for young actors in the city, as a child Ella Smart attended performances at the Seattle Repertory theater, and that universe of hers fascinated him.

Thanks to the work of his father and thanks also to the diabetes that was diagnosed at the age of 13.

Due to her illness, her mother would not allow her to study outside of Seattle, which caused her to attend the University of Washington, which has an excellent theater program.

"I don't know what would have happened to me if I hadn't studied there, so I have to thank my mother and my diabetes," she said Smart.

Actresses Hannah Einbinder and Jean Smart, in the second season of 'Hacks'. Karen Ballard (Karen Ballard/HBO Max)

Later, freed from maternal concern, she managed to move to New York.

She moved in with a friend who lived on the Upper West Side and began auditioning under a very peculiar criteria: "Sometimes I would choose them based on whether or not I could get there, I was very unfamiliar with Manhattan."

Her first stage role was as the lead in Jane Chambers's

, which is known as the first openly lesbian stage play, a sort of female version of

, in which Lil, the character played by Smart, falls in love with a woman who soon after discovers that she is dying of cancer.

It was 1980 and the actress invited her parents to her performance, no matter how embarrassed she was when they saw her kissing a woman on stage.

From there he made the leap to television.

After participating in series such as

and

and, almost forty years before succeeding with a comedy on HBO, one of her first important roles took place in a series on the same platform.

It was that of Dr. Allison Brody, a psychiatrist at the prison in which

was set, a 1984 HBO series starring Robert Desiderio and Geoffrey Lewis.

After this, she went on to the fiction that definitively launched her to fame,

(1986-1993), created by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, which recounted the adventures and misadventures of a group of women who ran a fashion design company. interiors in Atlanta.

Two years before it was released

opened the season for comedies set in a professional setting, created by and starring women.

In this case, the main cast was completed by Annie Potts, Delta Burke and Dixie Carter.

Smart not only gave her the success she deserves, her talent, but her family: there she met her husband, actor Richard Gilliland, who played Annie Potts' boyfriend.

She began a relationship that lasted more than 35 years, until Gilliland's passing last year.

The phenomenon that the series entailed in the United States did not deter the actress: in its fifth season she left it to try other roles.

Her record change included playing assassin Aileen Wuornos in a TV movie.

called

, a role that eleven years later gave Charlize Theron her Oscar for

, in addition to several series.

In 1995, he co-starred with Mary McDonell in

, a kind of North American

that CBS only had on the air for one season, and he participated in films such as the second part of

where he was part of the secondary school choir that covered —such as if needed—to Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, including Christine Baranski and Mary Beth Peil.

Jean Smart in her role as Lana Gardner in the series 'Frasier', for which she won two Emmys for best guest actress.NBC

The year 2000 brought him his first award-winning television role.

Lana Gardner was a charismatic, sexy, and loud-mouthed woman who had been a classmate of Frasier's.

Both he and her brother Niles had been in love with her and Frasier managed to fulfill his high school dream by starting an affair with her.

had been running for seven seasons

when Smart earned her first Emmy for Best Guest Actress for that performance.

And she repeated the award the following year, not even

was the first time that Smart has achieved the feat of winning two consecutive awards from the American Television Academy for the same role.

Although he has devoted himself mainly to comedy—in the twenty years between

and

, he has appeared on

,

,

, which gave her her third Emmy, this time for Best Supporting Actress,

and

, to name just a few— we've been able to enjoy her wide range across a wide variety of genres.

She has been Martha Logan, the wife (and later ex) of the president of the United States in

We have seen her play police detectives in series like

,

and

a character mobster in the second season of

She has given her voice to a good handful of animated characters in series such as

,

and

, and even crossed the borders of science fiction in

, where she played Dr. Melanie Bird.

It was precisely her role in

, that of a woman older than her that allowed her to change her appearance (everyone thought she was wearing a wig, but she dyed her hair and cut it), which, according to her, was a a certain brake in his last years of career.

"I think the

directors didn't know what to do with me after that," she said in an interview with

, where she took the opportunity to talk about her vanity: “I've been a supporting actress long enough for that not to be a big concern.

But I have to admit that I am incredibly vain.

I live in complete denial about my age and my appearance right now.

I see myself on screen and I think 'What?

Who is she?'.

But luckily I'm a bit more vain about acting.

Thanks God".

He has made up for that brief technical stoppage with his last three years of career, which many would like for themselves throughout his career.

Since 2019, in addition to

, she has been seen in the television adaptation of

on HBO by Damon Lindelof, where she played Laurie Blake and gave rise to one of the most remembered moments of the series, for the

of Dr. Manhattan that she carried with her, and in

where she played Kate Winslet's mother and the show's only (somewhat) comedic relief.

During the filming of her, Kate Winslet got used to calling her "mom" to the point that when Ella Smart had an accident (she fell and hurt her back) the doctors who came to pick her up on the

they believed that Winslet was their daughter.

Helen, Mare's mother in 'Mare of Easttown', played by Jean Smart.HBO

Smart has been aware that after a certain age the roles that are offered to women are mostly mothers, as if that trait, in itself, completed a character definition.

“Sometimes you have to consciously walk away from those roles.

You don't want to be just the mother figure.

Even my character in

is not the mother of the year.

During the filming of

, the actress was a full-time mother, not only during filming: she traveled twice a week from Philadelphia, where the series was filmed, to Los Angeles to spend time with her 15-year-old son Forrest, adopted by her and her husband in 2009, who came to extend the offspring that they had already inaugurated with their son Connor, 37 years old.

“It was exhausting, but I had to do it.

She wanted to do it.”

Her extraordinary professional moment has coincided with a fateful personal event, the death of her husband, Richard Gilliland, a week after which she had to film the funeral that appears at the end of the first season of

.

“She sacrificed her career for me, so that I could take advantage of all my opportunities.

I wouldn't have been able to have all of this if it wasn't for him."

And how to face the second season of

in this situation?

"While I'm working it's therapeutic, very enjoyable and satisfying and it can distract you if you're feeling down," she told

, ”but it's been a much harder season than the first one because dad wasn't home steering the boat.

We've also had longer days this year because of the locations, so I spent the day asking 'Has Forrest had breakfast?

Has he arrived at school on time?

Who was picking you up today?'

This was in my head all day, so it's been hard.

I have no idea how single moms do it and I have way, way more resources than most working moms do.

I can't even imagine it."

Does she look like Deborah Vance from

?

"We have in common a taste for leopard

and sequins," she told this summer in an interview for

.

Listening to her speak is also knowing that they share a sense of humor, as Smart herself certifies.

"Sarcasm is my arsenal."

But she has never dared to do

despite having been an admirer of many comedians of the genre.

The sense of humor as a throwing weapon is shared with his next character.

It will be in

, the next film by Damien Chazelle, focused on golden Hollywood and starring Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Tobey Maguire.

In it, she plays Elinor Glyn, the British writer who coined the term

at the beginning of the 20th century and the person who turned Clara Bow into a movie star, a forerunner of Hedda Hopper, and Louella Parsons, a columnist capable of forging or to destroy races.

Smart's own, in any case, seems bombproof.