Hi everyone- some folks had asked me to type up the article on Gail O'Grady I had seen. It took me a few days longer than I expected. Hope you enjoy on this non AD Sunday.It's a nice article and a little more in depth than some others we have seen.


Some actresses might not want to admit that they are works in progress. But on this bright California afternoon, on her bedroom balcony, Gail O’Grady is so at ease letting it all out, laughing and groaning about her own inadequacies, it almost seems as if someone has put truth serum in her roasted blend. O’Grady’s fix –it list includes her technophobia (“I just do email”), her impatience (“I’m not good at waiting”), and her topsy-turvy love life (serious self-analysis to follow). And then there’s her big professional bugaboo: “I choke in auditions. Instead of going in and letting it rip, I choke. It has been a problem for years.
Thankfully the dry larynx didn’t show up the day she auditioned for the role of Helen Pryor, the bouffant-topped mom on NBC’s early-sixties drama American Dreams. “I’ve gotten to the point where I try to take a big dose of “So what? Before I go in, and then act my butt off, I try not to make everything so important.” Tom Verica, who plays O’Grady’s husband, Jack, on the show, isn’t surprises by his co-star’s success. “Gail is on a path to grow, and she gets to the core of things, “ he says. As for O’Grady, she’s thrilled her show is a sleeper, and not just so she can keep the gray Jaguar in her circular drive humming. “I need structure or I find myself stirring up my life in the wrong direction” she says. “There is a part of me that thrives on craziness. Yesterday was a good example: I had people painting, people hanging window treatments, and I had all this other work to do. Why do I do this to myself?”
Just as O’Grady has evolved, so has her home-but not without some angst. In 1997, she fell in love with the Mediterranean-style hilltop villa in Encino, a house that conjures images of the Costa Del Sol. But a few months after she moved in , an El Nino storm pummeled her property, and a retaining wall buckled. “I had to move out in the middle of the night, “ O’Grady says. After she returned, she was faced with a seemingly endless do-si-do of bulldozers, geologists, and hard hats. “It was baaaad,” she says, looking out of the expansive windows of her two-story family room. “For three and a half years,” she says with a get-this look. “I would have to come downstairs in full tiara because there would be 20 workers out there.”
At the time, her heart wasn’t into flipping though paint-color wheels, and she even thought of dumping the gated house. But last year, “I decided to make the place how I wanted it to be the day I moved in,” says the actress, tiaraless but still fairly sparkling in orange-tinted Gucci glasses, a cashmere sweater coat and Hermes loafers. After enlisted the help of a few decorators, she realized her own vision: Elegance (note the 19th-century Chinese prints in the marbled foyer) meets kookiness (the frog and alligator statues in the palm-dotted backyard). Her quest for zest extends to what the animal lover calls her Safari Room, a guest retreat complete with cheetah-print duvets and zebra paintings. “This might not match, but if a room doesn’t have some whimsy, then it’s not me.”
But O’Grady, who recently turned 40, also likes more than a soupcon of luxury. She leads a tour of her haute-French boudoir, punctuated-with several exclamation points-by a massive, eye-popping canopy bed. From there, it’s just a few short steps to the master bathroom’s sunken tub, replete with a crystal dish filled with bars of gold-foiled soap. As it turns out, she wasn’t totally kidding about the tiara. “Listen,” she says, “when I was a kid, I used to wear one to breakfast, OK?” Nearby, a bannered pillow-a gift she received from a teasing pal-says it all” Queens never make bargains.” Says Verica, “Gail’s home is extravagant, but there is a certain intimacy to it as well. It’s warm. It’s fun.”
Indeed, O’Grady is the first to acknowledge her charmed life. She was born in Detroit, but when she was 10, her father, Jim, a financial planner, and mother, a housewife, moved Gail and brother Michael, now 41 and a financial adviser in Los Angeles, to Wheaton, Ill., a quaint Chicago suburb that could be straight out of Dreams. The whole troop went ice-skating at the family cabin in Wisconsin every winter. Just one rub: “In our house, everyone was a chief. Everybody’s bossy, loud, and strong.”
Back when she was 4, a local department store had roped her and Michael into doing fashion shows. “I loved playing dress-up,” says the longtime Sound of Music fan, who today keeps a collection of snow globes on a shelf by her bed. She was less thrilled with school (“I hated it”), and by the time she graduated from Wheaton North High in 1981, she had already acquired an agent and landed local modeling gigs and commercials (for Nestles and McDonald’s) to help convince her parents that she was better off pursuing a showbiz career than college. In 1986 O’Grady headed to L.A., where she shared an apartment with Chicago acting class chum Virginia Madsen-who now happens to play Rebecca Sandstrom on Dreams-and quickly lined up guest parts on such TV shows as Matlock and Cheers.
Her quirky turn as maternal secretary Donna Abandando on NYPD Blue put her on the map in 1993. O’Grady came up with the characters’ sixties-retro outfits and wild hair herself (“If there’s a bouffant role, it’s mine !”), but after three years and just as many Emmy nominations, “ There were other opportunities opening up, and I wanted to go for it.” After some fun in flicks, lik Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo in 1999, and a 2001 stint as Robert Downey Jr’s ex-wife on Ally McBeal, she landed Dreams.
O’Grady understands the irony of that statement, considering that Helen Pryor has four kids while her own maternal side so far has been reserved for Gordy, her poodle, and Lilly, a shih tzu. Her three marriages-to her high-school sweetheart (“We were young”), to a businessman (in 1987) and then for a year to manager Steven Fenton (in 1995-1996) - haven’t left her bitter (“I’m friends with many of my exes”). But she remains a bit mystified by love. “I romanticize. So I have made some wrong choices. I used to not even talk about it because I felt so embarrassed or judged. But I have recently stopped beating up myself about that.”
So friends fill the chairs around the imposing walnut table in her dining room, with its floral-frescoed ceiling. “I have all the chafing dishes,” she says laughing. Meanwhile, cobwebs may be forming in the gym that she fashioned in a loft overlooking the family room. “It takes the jaws of life to get me to work out,” jokes O’Grady, who does venture out to play tennis. She also loves shopping for the kids on her show. “I’ll see a toy and think, Ethan would love this, or Sarah would love this. I’ll find the older girls purses.”
Is her clock ticking here? “Can you hear it?” she teases. “Am I supposed to panic? Am I supposed to all of a sudden be undesirable? I refuse to buy into that.” At this point, she’s content to wait for a mete “who has enough sense of self that he can let me be me”-that “me” being a woman who’s been known to sport a parasol around the Dreams set to protect her skin from the sun and dress up as a male grip at a party (she did that for Halloween). And how many women rush home in their Jaguar to rock to Bono or catch South Park? “Gail can come across as very refined and then be really bawdy,” says Verica. “She’s a princess who doesn’t hold back.”
As if to prove his point, O’Grady plops down on an old green and gold sofa in the family room and declares, a note of diva in her voice, “This is the most uncomfortable sofa I’ve ever sat on. I want one that you can just fall into, put your feet up and watch TV.” “I think if you have any kind of self-awareness, if you have a desire and you are willing, you can design your life and have it any way you want,” she says. So is she realizing her own dreams? Well, scratch one big item off her list. These days, says O’Grady, “I feel like when I come home, I’m home.”

Thanks so much, Shari. I appreciate it. I'm sure everyone else does, too