After dry spell, Teri Hatcher lands at top
By Charlie McCollum
Mercury News
February 13, 2005
UNIVERSAL CITY - Teri Hatcher ought to be happy.
The 40-year-old Sunnyvale native is the breakout star of the
television season's biggest hit, "Desperate Housewives."
She is on magazine covers and is getting fashion layouts in the
New York Times Sunday Magazine. She just won a Golden Globe for
best comedy actress. In just a few months, she has gone from a
self-described "has-been" to the top of the TV world.
But late one afternoon just days after the Golden Globes, Hatcher
is curled up in the corner of a hotel room couch and fighting off
tears as a reporter asks about all the praise now coming her way.
"People didn't say those kinds of things, write those kinds
of things, about me for a long time," she says. "You want
to be a strong enough person not to care what people think. You know
that's not the most important thing. Your inner strength, your
family, that's what matters.
"But my whole life, it's been hard to keep my confidence up.
I'm still pretty insecure. That's where my character on the show
and I relate the most. Everybody thinks it's about being a single
mom and it's really not. It's about insecurity."
Not that long ago, Hatcher says, she was having trouble even getting
auditions. Early last year, she found herself in "in some
deeply sad places," fearful that she would have to sell her
home in the San Fernando Valley because she no longer could pay
the mortgage. "That was really a low point."
She admits that her time in show business -- which now spans almost
three decades -- has "had a lot of jump starts. But it's also
had a lot of stops. It's been a long, weird career."
Born in December 1964, Teri Lynn Hatcher was a true Silicon Valley
kid, the only child of Owen Hatcher, an electrical engineer for AMD,
and his wife Esther, a computer technician for Lockheed.
Hatcher's first love was dancing and performing. While at Fremont
High, she was captain of the Featherettes, the school's dance team.
She took lessons at such places as Los Altos' San Juan School of
Dance, did stage shows with such local companies as the Children's
Musical Theatre of San Jose and took acting classes at the American
Conservatory Theater, including one with Oscar nominee-to-be Annette
Bening.
But her parents, particularly her father, didn't feel show business
was a proper career.
"At the time, my father told me he wouldn't pay for me to go to
college to study anything other than mathematics -- something he's
now endlessly regretful for," says Hatcher. "He's apologized
I can't tell you how many times."
Still, when Hatcher graduated from Fremont in 1982 -- her class voted
her "Most Likely to Become a Solid Gold Dancer" -- she
enrolled at De Anza College with the aim of following her parents'
wishes and getting a degree in math and electrical engineering.
She kept her dancing up by working as a San Francisco 49ers
cheerleader, but "I thought I'd be a math teacher. I really
didn't think I was going to be a electrical engineering wizard in
Silicon Valley," she says. "I definitely thought there'd
be something rewarding about being a woman teaching math to teenage
women. I thought I could make a difference, be the teacher where
people go, `I got a cool math teacher.' "
In the spring of 1985, Hatcher was all set to transfer to the
California Polytechnic Institute in San Luis Obispo. But she
tagged along with a friend wanted to try out to be one of the
Mermaids, a dance company on the TV series "The Love Boat."
(The eight Mermaids actually spent most of their time sitting around
the ship's pool in bikinis.)
"It was like the `American Idol' of the 1980s," recalls
Hatcher with a laugh. "People lined up down the block, waiting
for their little five-minute audition. You went in in groups of 20s,
get into three lines and they'd teach you a little dance combination.
"I don't have any idea why but I won that in San Francisco. So
then I got the honor of flying down to Los Angeles and doing the whole
thing again against 5,000 other people. And they picked eight of us."
Even then, though, Hatcher thought it was a temporary, pre-college
gig: "It wasn't like a big thrill of being on TV. To be honest,
it was a paycheck -- $1,100 and something a week. That was more per
week than my mom made working at Lockheed. I had never even heard of
that kind of money.
"But I thought I would go back to Cal Poly and finish college.
I never thought I would stay and have a career."
Then "an agent came to me while I was on `The Love Boat.' I never
went, `Oh, I'm in Los Angeles now, I need an agent.' So when `The Love
Boat' ended, my agent went, `You need to go and audition.' Well, I didn't
even know what that meant."
What that meant, almost immediately, was a recurring role on
"MacGyver," then a hit TV series, as struggling actress
Penny Parker, and a string of guest appearances on various shows.
Perhaps the most memorable of those guest shots was a February 1993
appearance on "Seinfeld," in which she played a woman with
breasts so perfect that Jerry and Elaine could not believe they were
real.
Her exit line -- "they're real and they're spectacular" -- became
part of the "Seinfeld" lexicon. ("Now, they're just
real," says Hatcher.)
Her real break, though, came later that year with "Lois & Clark:
The New Adventures of Superman," a revisionist take on the Man of
Steel in which she played a sexy Lois Lane to Dean Cain's hunky Clark Kent.
With an emphasis on romance and humor -- there was relatively little
action in the series -- "Lois & Clark" became a Sunday night
hit for ABC and Hatcher became a star. A publicity photo she posed for,
cloaked in the Superman's cape and nothing else, is still one of the
most downloaded images in the history of America Online.
When "Lois & Clark" finally ran out of steam in the spring
of 1997, Hatcher looked like she could have her choice of film and TV
roles. She did get to be a Bond girl in "Tomorrow Never Dies."
She also had a good part -- and a very memorable fight scene with
Charlize Theron -- in John Herzfeld's underrated 1997 thriller
"2 Days In the Valley."
But in 1994, Hatcher had married fellow actor Jon Tenney. (A previous
marriage to personal trainer Marcus Leithold had ended in divorce after
less than a year.) And in November 1997, she gave birth to a daughter,
Emerson Rose, and began to be more selective about what roles she went
after.
(One role she did take -- for what she describes as an "exorbitant
amount of money" -- was that of ex-NFL star Howie Long's
"wife" in a series of popular tongue-in-cheek commercials
for Radio Shack.)
Tenney and Hatcher divorced in early 2003, leaving Hatcher a single
mom in search of work. One of the things she tried was a sitcom with
Touchstone Television, then headed by Steve McPherson, now entertainment
president at ABC.
"We had just turned in a first draft of the comedy when `Desperate
Housewives' came along" at Touchstone, Hatcher recalls. "My
sitcom wasn't picked up, but I got the the `Housewives' script and
read it. And it was one of the best-written things I had ever read,
including movies. It was just perfect, a perfect script."
Hatcher met with "Housewives" creator Marc Cherry and other
producers "and the first thing -- as it always is for me -- is
that they had to realize I'm not this glamorous whatever anymore. The
lucky thing for me is that Steve McPherson had spent the last year
developing ideas with me and seeing photos of me on camping trips
with Emerson."
Remembering those photos, McPherson told the show's producers that
there was another side to Hatcher, that she was more than the sexy
girl in the Superman cape.
Hatcher auditioned for `Housewives," for the role of Susan Mayer,
a single mom with a louse for an ex-husband and a terrific teenage
daughter. "My audition was truly an out-of-body experience,"
she says. "It was the most spot-on audition I've ever had in my
life. It was an audition you could walk away from and say, `Well, if
I don't get it, there's nothing else I could have done.' "
In other words, Hatcher was afraid she hadn't gotten the part. But
"Housewives" creator Marc Cherry says that "when we
said to ABC, `Oh, Teri Hatcher came in today and gave a great audition,'
they were very excited.
"She's a fresh face again, and that happens sometimes to good
actors. They do their hit and kind of go away for a while and then
they can come back and re-invent themselves. That's what happened
with Teri."
The other lead actresses on "Desperate Housewives" --
Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross and Eva Longoria -- all have gotten
due credit for the success of the show, one of TV's most-watched,
with an audience of 25 million.
But it's Hatcher who has seen her career skyrocket, winning not only
the Golden Globe but, more recently, an award from the Screen Actors
Guild. Not only has she managed to bring a mix of spunk and insecurity
to the role of Susan Mayer but she has displayed an unexpected Lucille
Ball-like gift for physical comedy.
The two most memorable scenes of the series' first season have been
tours de force for Hatcher: an early one where a naked Susan Mayer
is locked out of her home, a brilliant bit of choreographed comedy,
and one in a recent episode where Mayer combines a karaoke version
of "New York, New York" with a rant against her ex-husband.
"Who gets this kind of material?" Hatcher asks gleefully,
noting it's been "especially" unusual for such scenes to
go to "a woman who's 40."
There are some down sides to this return to stardom, though. For one
thing, it's putting a lot of pressure on Hatcher's time with her
daughter, Emerson. Even though she has some support -- Tenney lives
nearby, and her parents recently moved from Sunnyvale to Laguna
Beach -- Hatcher says "it's really hard. Everybody knew going
in that being a mother was my priority. They try to respect that in
terms of the hours and getting Sundays off.
"But the hugeness of this show, the phenomenon of this show,
no one could have predicted. It's created a long of demands that are
not typical of a TV show. So right now, there's really no room for
anything else in my life besides my work and my daughter."
And then there are the paparazzi, the packs of freelance photographers
trying for a shot they can sell to the supermarket tabloids.
"They're bumming my daughter out. She really doesn't like it,"
says Hatcher. "They're sitting outside my house now. There are 20
of them at the deli when I just want to have pancakes and eggs.
"I didn't anticipate that because I had forgotten about it. The
last time I experienced it, I didn't have a child in my life."
Still, says Hatcher, the last few months have rejuvenated her as an
actress and as a person.
"Even if no one watched `Desperate Housewives,' for me to get it
and get to do it is a great, great thing. Then the fact that it's
followed up by the ratings and the Golden Globe and everything else
is just icing on the cake."
Then Hatcher turns reflective and says quietly: "Maybe I couldn't
have accomplished this when I was younger. You're just ready for things
when you're ready for them and they're ready for you.
"I'm not really thinking about what could happen next week for me.
Because I know it could all go away -- very quickly."
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