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Celebrating Christine Baranski at 70
She can be devastatingly funny, brilliantly smart, deeply emotional. She’s done theater, series, movies, and was highlighted by every award – including several Golden Globe nominations. Born on May 2nd, 1952 in Buffalo, New York, in a Polish family with theater and music backgrounds, Christine Baranski is one of our most eclectic actors, from Cybill to The Good Fight, from the unsufferable camp director of Addams Family Values to the strict grand New York dame of The Gilded Age – and much more.
Recently we had the pleasure of sitting down with Baranski for an HFPA podcast – and the narration of her long and fruitful career reads (and sounds) much better in her narration. We learned that “the great Maggie Smith” is her favorite actor,- “a consummate actress, dramatically and comedically both”; that she delights in the fact of having thrice worked with Meryl Streep – “two Mamma Mias!”, plus one Into The Woods – and done one big-screen musical, ChicagoRoswell and the movie Antebellum. “She went to Princeton and she did some acting at Princeton but then stopped acting, became a religion major, and then went to Oxford and did anthropology”, Baranski said. “And I think she resisted for a long time because I really did not push.”
Baranski’s roots are deep, she tells. ”My grandparents were actors in the Polish theater in Buffalo. And I lived with my Nana, we shared a bedroom. And she was…talk about a flamboyant character, she wrote her own comedy show on the Polish radio in Buffalo. Buffalo had a large Polish American community. And so I was sort of sharing a bedroom and living with a woman who was rather like Auntie Mame, she had a beautiful personality and her clothes were colorful and she had colorful friends, they were all from Poland.”
Her path seemed to be traced from the very beginning. “I grew up hearing Polish, a great feeling for Polish music and dance. So it was around, that sense of theatricality. And then my mom and my grandmother would go off to play bingo on Friday nights, leaving me at my (other) grandma’s (house). And she had a collection of LPs that were musicals back in the days when you played LPs on a big stereo system. So I would play South Pacific or some Rogers and Hammerstein LP over and over. I knew all the lyrics and I sang and danced. I think it was a part of me forever.”
She always saw herself as a theater actress – it was her goal and her dream. “I was really lucky because in my 20s I went out of town for years and years doing wonderful plays, great roles, in the way that you have to go out of town in order to do Moliere or Shakespeare or Chekhov or Shaw. I was just always working, always packing my bags, getting on a train and going to some city and playing, doing wonderful roles. And that’s how I got my experience, which I really valued.”
After years on Off-Off-Broadway, Off-Broadway, and Broadway – she has a particular fondness for her nine months doing Boeing, Boeing, “a really insane funny farce”- Baranski finally said yes to television – Cybill, from 1995 to 1998, was a key role for her TV work – and movies – a range from Reversal of Fortune to Chicago and beyond. “I was cast often because of my…maybe sexuality or sexiness or foxiness or irreverence”, she says. “But I wasn’t…I was never the beautiful ingénue.”
Now on The Gilded Age as the formidable Agnes Van Rhijn and starring in The Good Fight as Diane Lockhart, Baranski is delighted in the broad options of her talent. “As soon as The Good Fight did our last episode, two days later I was on a plane to L.A. to do my last episode of The Big Bang Theory. And it was so wonderful. (…) I would get to do drama, the two masks, drama, and comedy.”