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A Taylor-Made Career

If you’ve watched even a few movies or televisions shows in the last few decades, chances are pretty good you’ve seen Holland Taylor in something. The prolific stage and screen actress has had prominent roles in dozens of movies and TV shows over the last thirty years, developing the kind of steady career many actresses can only dream of, and you can currently see her on the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, where she has a recurring role as the acerbic mother of brothers played by Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer.

But many AfterEllen.com readers probably know her as Peggy Peabody in The L Word, and Ms. Petrie in Angela Robinson‘s lesbian teen romantic comedy D.E.B.S.

Taylor first got involved with D.E.B.S. when she saw the short film premiere at the Power Up gala in 2002. “It was maybe six or seven minutes long and it was just hysterical,” she recalls in a phone interview. “It showed a lot of the director’s talent. So I went up to Angela afterwards and told her how much I liked it. Later, when it got made into a feature, she wrote in a part for me.”

The 62-year-old Philadelphia native also worked with Robinson indirectly when she guest-starred on the first season of The L Word in 2003 – Robinson was a staff writer on Showtime’s hit lesbian series at the time.

“I thought the character was just delicious,” Taylor says of “has-bian” Peggy Peabody, the role series creator Ilene Chaiken recruited her for. “The script was very, very thoroughly written. I thought it was Ilene’s script, I didn’t think it was written by a staff writer., and I said ‘Well, I think this is just wonderful!’ It was only afterwards that I realized it was Angela’s script.”

Taylor became the first of what would become a parade of well-known guest stars on The L Word.

“I wouldn’t not do it because it was a lesbian-themed show,” she says, when asked whether she had any concerns about appearing on a show with such potentially controversial subject matter. “I’m not going to say ‘oh, I’m not going to be associated with that show.’ It’s a very cool show.”

Like the lesbian relationships on The L Word, Taylor thinks the lesbian romance in D.E.B.S. works because it’s not heavy-handed, but it’s not downplayed, either.

The romance plays as just one more twist in a satirical film full of twists and turns. But, says Taylor, “when you make a jest like that, you have to make it boldly. If you’re at all timid about it, it won’t work with the audience, because it’s like telling a joke weakly – the air goes out of it and the audience senses that you don’t believe in it yourself, so why should they?”

Taylor is dismayed that lesbian relationships like those on The L Word and in D.E.B.S. are still relatively rare and controversial on screen. “It actually sort of embarrasses me for mankind, that there should be the amount of attention on [sexual orientation] that there is. It’s like ‘are you nuts? How can you possibly feel this way?'”

Taylor is no stranger to provocative roles. Her turn as the sexually aggressive Judge Roberta Kittleson on ABC’s legal drama The Practice in 1999 at the age of 56 brought her considerable acclaim, including an Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series.

“It was great fun and it was very important to me,” Taylor says of that role. “I’m not at all a political person or political performer, but in retrospect, after the fact, how incredibly wonderful it was to portray women as I know them. I don’t know any women in their forties and fifties who aren’t sexually active.”

Taylor’s acting schedule is just as busy now as it was when she was ten or thirty years younger. Is this an exception to the prevailing wisdom in Hollywood that women over 40 can’t get good roles – or a sign that this practice is waning?

“Everything changes and everything stays the same,” Taylor answers philosophically. “In the forties, women over forty were everywhere; they were the leading ladies. All of them were Joanne Crawford; all of them looked like middle-aged women.”

“Now there is an odd immaturity, which I think may be a backlash. As women have become more vocal and more powerful, frightened males have had to keep women more infantile. So the dispersal of fine roles to people of all ages became extinct in the seventies and eighties and nineties, where you had to be younger and younger and younger.”

So while there may be better parts for older women these days, Taylor believes it’s more cyclical than progressive.

Forty years ago when she was just getting started, Taylor had hoped to build a career in theater, not film and television. “I hoped that I would be a very busy and successful,” she says. “I hoped that I would be an admired advocate in the theater and on top of my last act in New York.”

Taylor first moved to New York in 1966 after getting a degree in drama from Bennington College, and made her Broadway debut in The Devils, starring Anne Bancroft.

Although she continued to work steadily in theater, she was forced to turn to Hollywood for more lucrative roles.

“The theater is where I am definitely happier, the most skilled,” says Holland. “That’s not to say I don’t enjoy doing all these variety of other things, I’ve just always really regretted that the entertainment industry in America is divided by 3,000 miles. You can’t be in a movie and be in the theater at once, and you can’t really support yourself in the theater once you’re done being a kid.”

Taylor flew back and forth for awhile, doing small roles in film, television and theater, but finally moved to L.A. permanently in the late 70s when she landed a recurring role on CBS crime drama The Edge of Night (1977-78, 80) and then a major role in 1980 on Bosom Buddies, the cross-dressing ABC sitcom starring Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari.

When Buddies folded after two seasons, she did a stint on All My Children (1981-82), and then began to get an increasing number of movie roles, in films like Romancing the Stone (1984), To Die For (1995), The Truman Show (1998), Keeping the Faith (2000), Legally Blonde (2001), and Spy Kids 2 and 3 (2002, 2003).

She garnered more critical acclaim for her performance as Nancy Reagan in the Showtime movie The Day Reagan was Shot (2001), and landed recurring roles on the Tea Leoni-led sitcom The Naked Truth (1995-98) and Two and a Half Men (2003). While juggling her role on Men, Taylor also filmed D.E.B.S. and Wedding Date.

Now, after decades of hard work, Taylor is finally at a place where she can be more selective about the roles she takes on.

“It took a long time to get to the place in my career where I could pick and choose what I wanted to do it,” she says. “For a long time I pretty much had to take whatever job was coming along.”

Taylor doesn’t have many regrets about her career. “I think I handled each transition as well as I could,” she says reflectively. “I do think I expected my career to put me in a different position much earlier. A number of things that I was in were wonderful, but were not recognized as wonderful at the time. I did a fantastic Normal Lear series, Powers That Be, which some people felt, had it been recognized by NBC for what it was, certainly would have made a very big impact on my career. I’ve been in different plays that I felt were extraordinary opportunities. Even Bosom Buddies, I thought would have a bigger impact on my career.”

“I think, like most actors, I wonder what could have been,” Taylor continues, “but I always reassure myself, ‘how could you possibly know?’ You can’t second-guess yourself. You just have to say ‘that’s the way it turned out.'”

Not that Taylor has much time for second guessing herself these days: in addition to her busy film and television schedule, she is finishing her second year of a two-year course at the University of Santa Monica for a degree in Spiritual Psychology. “It’s a lot of work,” she admits. “Writing papers, attending a lot of classes – it’s been hard, and I haven’t had much of a social life for two years. But I’m very much looking forward to the third act of my life, and I want my master’s.”

Taylor’s third act is all about getting back to her first love: theater.

So she is making plans to begin dividing her time between New York and L.A. again, just as she did forty years ago. “I expect to be much more active in the next four years then I ever have been,” Taylor says. “I can go back and forth now with more ease, and I don’t have to worry about every job paying.”

Taylor’s career, like roles for women in Hollywood, may finally be coming full circle.

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