\nTonight’s British Soap Awards see TV icons Sharon Gless and Tyne Daly take to the stage to present the prize for Best Soap. Here, we present an archive Radio Times interview from 2011 in which the pair recall the hit show Cagney and Lacey, which shot them to stardom in the 1980s.\n
\u201cSweat makes good friendship cement,\u201d says Tyne Daly of her relationship with Sharon Gless. The phrase comes from her mother, but Daly admits that it\u2019s a perfect description of the bond that exists between the two actresses, who sweated on screen for six years as Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey in the groundbreaking 1980s US cop drama.\n
\u201cBefore Cagney and Lacey, we didn\u2019t follow officers home to find out what they did when they took their badges off and emptied their guns,\u201d adds Daly. \u201cSo the idea that these women also had lives outside of work was really interesting to play.\u201d\n
\u201cIt was because of us that subsequent shows like NYPD Blue were allowed to exist,\u201d says Sharon Gless. \u201cThat was basically Cagney and Lacey with two men in that it featured male leads who talked about their feelings. NYPD Blue was a great show, but I always thought we did it better. We were the first cop drama to have principal characters who were allowed to be vulnerable.\u201d\n
\n
Cagney and Lacey may now be regarded as genuinely original but, at the time of its inception, American networks felt it a risk to put two female actors centre-stage in a drama.\n
Says Daly: \u201cIt was always OK to have women in comedies. In the half-hour form, you\u2019d get I Love Lucy or The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where a little situation would get set up and be resolved in 30 minutes. But for an hour of dramatic television, they didn\u2019t quite trust that we could be interesting enough. I think we eventually managed to prove them ill-advised on that idea.\u201d\n
In October 1981, a one-off TV movie aired on CBS starring Daly and M*A*S*H actress Loretta Swit. When the production was picked up for a series, Swit proved unable to reprise the role of Cagney due to commitments to the Korean War-set comedy and Meg Foster was drafted in to replace her.\n
It was a casting choice that was to prove unpopular with executives: \u201cNot feminine enough,\u201d an unnamed CBS suit told listings magazine TV Guide. Foster was ousted after just three broadcast episodes.\n
\u201cI felt that we were beginning to hit our rhythm,\u201d says Daly. \u201cI liked Meg and I thought we worked well together, but there were demurs from the top. It was painful to go through that casting process again as it had been hard enough to find Meg.\u201d\n
As it turns out, producer Barney Rosenzweig had had a certain actress by the name of Sharon Gless in mind from the beginning and was determined to make her his Christine Cagney.\n
\u201cHe\u2019d offered it to me two times before,\u201d reveals Gless. \u201cBut actors aren\u2019t always the best judges of material and I\u2019d turned it down. When it came around for the third time, Barney found out that the sitcom I was in \u2013 House Calls \u2013 had been axed.\n
\u201cHe rang up my agent, Monique James, and said, \u2018I\u2019m calling for the third time to ask you to let Sharon Gless play Cagney\u2019. And she said, \u2018I told you, Barney, dear, Sharon\u2019s in a series.\u2019 And he said, \u2018You wanna bet she\u2019s in a series? She just got cancelled!\u201d\n
After some cajolement from Daly (\u201cShe bought me balloons and champagne to woo me into playing the part. Hey \u2013 I\u2019m easy\u201d), Gless came on board, although she did have reservations about the tactics employed by Rosenzweig:\n
\u201cI told Monique that I didn\u2019t like the guy with the beard. I thought he was arrogant. Ten years later, I married him.\u201d\n
\n
Back in 1982, however, marriage to Rosenzweig was the last thing on Gless\u2019s mind. After signing to portray the vivacious Christine Cagney, the actress had to undergo firearms training at the police academy, an experience that she found terrifying.\n
\u201cI hate guns. To begin with I was shooting blanks and then they loaded it up with real bullets. They wanted me to feel the kick that you get from having live ammunition in the chamber, but I started crying. And I\u2019m supposed to be the one playing the ballbuster. On the series, Tyne would carry her gun in her purse, but I refused. So in order to give the impression of weight, my purse always had two tomato juice cans in it.\u201d\n
For Tyne Daly, who had two daughters at the time and a third born in 1985, the pressures of starring in a prime-time drama were of a different nature: \u201cI was stopping at the midnight market on the way home and picking up the laundry on the way to work. I was trying to be a mom and spend time with my children and make dates with my husband. But hour-long drama is a life-eater, it really is. So it takes a lot of energy, but we were young and healthy and we were inspired to make this rare opportunity count.\u201d\n
Those efforts were rewarded with Daly scooping Emmys in three consecutive years for outstanding lead actress in a drama series. An enviable record to be sure, but was co-star Gless privately concerned about being overlooked?\n
\u201cEvery year, Barney Rosenzweig would come into my trailer and say, \u2018I worry about you, you\u2019re never going to win. Blondes only ever win in comedy.\u2019 And I said, \u2018I don\u2019t care. I\u2019m going to do it.\u2019 And then in the fourth and fifth year, I won. In the final season of the show, it went back to Tyne. But in all the years we were on the air, no one else won the Emmy in that lead actress category.\u201d\n
Even though they were vying for the same awards, it seems there was little rivalry between Gless and Daly, despite the fact that the former had been originally introduced to bolster what was perceived to be a failing enterprise.\n
\u201cTyne welcomed me with open arms,\u201d says Gless. \u201cIt\u2019s through her generosity that the whole thing worked. She treated me with the greatest respect.\u201d\n
\u201cThe art of acting is to pitch good,\u201d comments Daly. \u201cYou do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you. Plus there\u2019s that thing called chemistry and we definitely had a good click. It was fun, exciting, wordy work, but inside of it we did a lot of laughing, which is what gets people through 15-hour days.\u201d\n
The rapport between the two actors translated to the screen and viewers on both sides of the Atlantic took to these two entirely different but well-matched characters: Christine, the uptown girl with ambitions to further her career, and Mary Beth, who was bringing home a vital second wage to support her family. But how did Gless and Daly feel about the protagonists they portrayed?\n
\u201cIn my opinion, Christine Cagney is one of the most wonderful, complicated characters ever written for television,\u201d says Gless. \u201cShe was totally involved in her work, she screwed up, she drank and yet she wanted to be the first female police commissioner. The fascinating thing about her and Lacey was that they weren\u2019t best friends \u2013 they didn\u2019t hang out at each other\u2019s homes, for instance \u2013 but their lives depended on each other. Tyne would always have chosen to play Lacey, though.\u201d\n
\u201cYeah, absolutely,\u201d her co-star agrees. \u201cTo me, Mary Beth had complicating factors in her life that were important. She had to work. She wasn\u2019t doing it on a whim. If you look back at that time, a great many women in western culture were jugglers but they were considered to be self-indulgent. You know, going off from their job at home to do a sideline. I thought it was a good service to show that some of us have no option. The Laceys needed that extra salary.\u201d\n
\n
Cagney and Lacey ended its run on 16 May 1988. Over the course of its 125 episodes, there had been a further attempt at cancellation (seen off thanks to a letter-writing campaign orchestrated by Rosenzweig), but by the time the casebook closed, Gless and Daly had become two of the small screen\u2019s most recognisable faces.\n
More high-profile roles followed, with Daly receiving a Tony award for her stage performance in Gypsy, while Gless received further Emmy nominations for Nip\/Tuck and Burn Notice. In the mid-90s, there was even time for the pair to team up again in four Cagney and Lacey TV movies, fondly dubbed \u2018The Menopause Years\u2019.\n
Fast-forward to 2011 and Sharon Gless\u2019s play A Round-Heeled Woman is about to transfer from the Riverside Studios to the Aldwych Theatre. By coincidence, Tyne Daly will also be starring in London this winter when she takes her Broadway turn as Maria Callas in Master Class to the Vaudeville Theatre.\n
The chance to see Cagney followed by Lacey in the West End is a rare treat for theatregoers but also for the two former colleagues, whose busy schedules don\u2019t allow for a lot of catch-up time.\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not like we usually have time to sit in each other\u2019s kitchens and have coffee,\u201d admits Daly. \u201cBut we keep in touch on all the important stuff. We follow each other\u2019s work and we call each other up every once in a while in the deep of the night and do laughing and scratching and say \u2018how you doing?\u2019 It doesn\u2019t always happen with those you\u2019ve worked with, you know. Sometimes you say farewell and that\u2019s the end of that. So I consider it very lucky that I got Ms Gless\u2019s friendship out of this.\u201d\n
And what of Sharon Gless\u2019s relationship with the producer she once labelled \u201carrogant\u201d and who would later go on to become her husband? Has her opinion softened over the years?\n
\u201cI\u2019m now doing my tenth series on US television and the truth is, to this day, I\u2019ve never found a finer producer than Barney Rosenzweig. It\u2019s so nice that they\u2019re honouring him at the BFI along with Tyne and I. He was a feminist and he gave us the material. At that time, nobody was writing for women. Without him there would have been no Cagney and Lacey.\u201d\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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