When Julianna Margulies walks down the streets of New York, men routinely shudder and grab their chests as if they're having a heart attack. They lie down on sidewalks, all in a desperate attempt to get one of the world's most famous health professionals, ER's Nurse Hathaway, to show them some TLC. "I'm like, 'Ok, I played one on TV, but I'm not going to bend down and give you mouth-to-mouth,;" chortles Margulies.
The 34-year-old actress with the tangle of curly black tresses and green cat'-eyes is long accustomed to gawking men, and she dispatches them with grace. Over lunch in a Brentwood health-food restaurant, dressed in a brown turtleneck and a brown leather jacket, she appears both cheery and down-to-earth- the kind of girl who knows how to wield a saw (which she does) yet still loves to slip on a Narciso Rodriguez dress.
It's been six months since she walked away from the nation's highest-rated show, leaving a reported $27 million paycheck on the table and a veritable army of raised eyebrows.
"There's not a bone in my body that has any regret," she explains matter-of-factly, spearing her tuna with a fork. "Artistically I had nothing left to say. The only thing that made it difficult for me was all the outside people telling me how crazy i was! I don't want to spend my life waiting for a couple of years to go by so that I can be rich. I want to be rich now by enjoying my life. That's rich to me."
Today happens to be Margulies's first vacation day in almost two years. Forty-eight hours after her last ER episode, she flew to Prague to shoot the upcoming miniseries based on Marion Zimmer Bradley's best-selling book The Mists of Avalon. A feminist retelling of the Arthurian legend, Avalon stars Anjelica Huston, Joan Allen, and Margulies as Margaine (more commonly known as Morgan le Fay), Arthur's witchy half-sister and champion of the ancient goddess rituals. She then returned to Los Angeles to be in The Man from Elysian Fields, a film about a male-escort service (run by Mick Jagger, no less).
Now she's preparing for her Off-Broadway debut in Jon Robin Baitz's new play, The Ten Unknowns. The actress is bringing her distinctive brand of sanity to the part of a biology student who wanders into the psychological battel between a lecherous 80-year-old artist, played by Donald Sutherland, and his angst-ridden assistant.
For Margulies, the play has been a coming home of sorts, a return to her theater background, which has been all but obscured by her ER fame. When she first graduated from Sarah Lawrence, she performed in another play by Baitz, The Substance of Fire. Yet she hadn't met the playwright until he came up to her two summers ago in a restaurant with a script under his arm. He had just seen her perform at a summer-theater festival and announced, "'I've just been wondering who was suppose to play this part, and I just realized who,'" recalls Margulies. When he handed her the script, she was flabbergasted: "I said, 'I'm going to say yes before I read it. But yes!'"
The play is a heady examination of the artist's fear of creativity, and Margulies was surprised when she finally read it. "I think of myself as well educated, but Robby is a genius. I needed a thesaurus to get through the script," she says, laughing. "I called him up and said, 'Ok, what the fuck is going on here? I can hardly understand any of the words!'"
"She's breathtakingly clearheaded and idealistic and has an ability to smile through stuff," says Baitz. "I think it's very, very hard to unravel her- something I like in people and in actors. She has a highly developed sense of the here and now and the larger context."
For Margulies, theater still exerts a magical pull, promising an immediacy lost from most aspects of modern life, as well as a level of creativity autonomy lost in film and TV work. Last night, as she looped her lines for The Mists of Avalon, she had an epiphany. "I was thinking. Wow, it's going to be so amazing to be in complete control of my performance at the moment when I'm onstage and not have anyone come in and edit me. Everynight, no matter how much I'm directed during rehersals, I get to have the final say."
As a kid, Margulies was allowed to watch only one hour of TV a week, but that hour- of either Little House on the Praire or The Waltons- was seminal. She'd stand in front of the mirror and "reenact the whole thing by memory in my head. I would be either the Melissa Gilbert character or Elizabeth from The Waltons." She grew up in a hippie, health-food-eating household, the daughter of an arts-and-movement therapist and an adman who coined the famous Alka-Seltzer "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz" jingle. Her parents divorced when she was young, and her mother moved Margulies and her sisters back and forth bewtween Europe and the United States.
As a consequence of her itinerant childhood, Margulies nests with fervor, even if it's in a hotel room. "I love interior design. If I were never to act again, that's what I'd do," she says, thrilled that her new New York apartment is only blocks away from the home improvement emporium Gracious Home, where she bought her tool belt. "I call my style quick and dirty- looks great and probaly won't last long. I hung my curtains in my new apartment, and I ended up having to Scotch-tape things in the back. I just like the idea of being self-sufficient."
"She's an ace knitter. She'd knit sweaters all the time and give them away." says her friend and Mists of Avalon costar Joan Allen, who recalls how the fun-loving Margulies engineered the kidnapping of an actor's beloved stuffed dog. "We wrote ransom notes. We took Polaroids with bloody tissues coming out of the dog's mouth." Allen says, chuckling. "Afterward, she made a little sweater for the dog."
The Mists of Avalon is the kind of elaborate production that demanded certain athletic skills from its star. After her first day of screen warfare, Margulies called her dad to thank him for the years of riding lessons, and her live-in boyfriend, former ER costar Ron Eldard, for his personal tutorial in physical assertiveness. "When I met Ron, I was athletic but I didn't have any stamina for it. I always dillydallied," she explains. "Ron was a boxer. He was always running. He taught me to Rollerblade. He'd say 'It's not enough. You can keep going.' I used to get angry about it. I'd be like, 'Don't push me.' but now I can run five miles if I have to. I thanked him for making me a warrior."
