100 GREATEST TV STARS OF OUR TIME
Tough Customers: Hardboiled Sweetheart
People Magazine 2003 Special Edition
From a heroin-addicted hooker to a tireless forensic investigator, Marg Helgenberger found her characters mostly falling on one side of the law or the other. Not that she’s complaining, “I either play cops or criminals,” she said. “I gravitate toward edgier material because it suits my nature.” The Nebraska native got her start in 1982 as a spunky rookie cop on the ABC soap Ryan’s Hope. Six years later she lit up prime time with her Emmy-winning portrayal of prostitute K.C. Koloski on ABC’s Vietnam drama China Beach. “Marg could loll in a doorway like Lauren Bacall and the great actresses of the ‘40s,” said John Sacret Young, the series creator. “She was so cool – yet there were always fires burning inside.” After Beach was cancelled in 1991, Helgenberger kept those fires stoked in projects on film (she played the cancer victim whose case spurred the lawsuit in Erin Brockovich) and TV (she had a recurring role as the love interest of George Clooney’s Doug Ross on ER). But roles weren’t always easy to come by. “The comment I get most often is ‘Too old and too pretty,'” she said at the time. “And I’m thinking, so if I were younger and uglier I’d have more of a career?” In 2000, the sultry redhead was welcomed back to the weekly grind on CBS’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. As stripper turned criminologist Catherine Willows, Helgenberger is ‘hands down a pro,’ said costar Gary Dourdan. “I call her Margalicious. She brings a real sexuality to her role, a bit of a rough edge.” But for all her tough-chick bravado, the gritty world of CSI had proved a challenge. “I’m relatively squeamish in civilian life,” she said. “When we’re filming autopsy scenes, I actually feel sad.” Off screen she’s more likely to feel happy, now that the series has allowed her to nest in Santa Monica with her husband of 14 years, actor Alan Rosenberg, and son Hugh. Is there anything that could tempt her to fly the coop for a while? Sure, she said. “If Steven Speilberg or Steven Soderbergh or any number of directors were to say, ‘Hey, there’s this role, are you interested? I’d be there in a flash.”