HOMING INSTINCT
People Magazine
January 22, 2001
By Galina Espinoza and Mark Dagostino
‘CSI’’s Marg Helgenberger spends her days with the dead but prefers time with the living—her family
Standing in the doorway of her three-bedroom, Spanish-style house in Santa Monica, actress Marg Helgenberger yells a warning to her 10-year-old son Huey as he runs out to meet a friend: “Make sure you tie your shoes!” A few minutes later, when her husband, actor Alan Rosenberg, comes down the stairs with his arms full of laundry, Helgenberger stops him so she can find a certain green sweater, then sends him off to the dry cleaner. “My little househusband,” she jokes.
Such snapshots of Helgenberger’s domestic life may seem jarringly at odds with the gruesome crime scenes she encounters weekly as forensic investigator—and single mother—Catherine Willows on CBS’s ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,’ the season’s highest-rated new TV drama. But Helgenberger, 42, views her role as less about morbid analysis than about Willows’s struggle to balance career and parenthood, something the actress knows well. “It’s tough enough trying to work a day shift and figure out the babysitter situation,” she says. Willows, who, fittingly, works the graveyard shift, has it “extremely hard. So I want to make her as heroic as I possibly can in all aspects of her life.”
Her maternal instincts prevail even when playing a woman as controversial as Patsy Ramsey in last year’s miniseries ‘Perfect Murder, Perfect Town.’ Although questions remain about Ramsey’s involvement, if any, in her daughter JonBenét’s still-unsolved 1996 slaying, Helgenberger refused to pass judgment. “I just cleared the slate and thought of her as a mother and went from there,” she says. Similarly, while tackling the part of a cancer patient aided by Julia Roberts as legal crusader ‘Erin Brockovich,’ Helgenberger approached her character not as a dying woman but as a “good-hearted working-class mother who wanted to keep her family happy and healthy to the point of being in denial.”
For inspiration Helgenberger could perhaps look to her own mother, Kay, 65, a high school nurse in North Bend, Neb., where Marg and her sister and brother grew up. Kay married her onetime high school sweetheart, Hugh Helgenberger, a meat inspector, and cared for him during his five-year bout with multiple sclerosis until his 1986 death. “To the end he was such a believer in the human spirit,” says Marg. “He never complained.”
And he expected his children—Marg, her sister Anne, 43, a Minneapolis homemaker and college student, and brother Curt, 40, a meat inspector near Lincoln, Neb.—to be equally tough. Once, fed up with Marg and Curt’s squabbling, he strapped boxing gloves on them, and “we just got it on” in the front yard, says Curt. When Marg was a teenager, her dad got her a summer job at his plant. “One of the jobs I had was cutting out the blood clots on a side of beef,” she recalls. “You’d stick your knife in sometimes and pop a spot—and it would bleed in your face.”
Good training, no doubt, for ‘CSI,’ and in fact acting was already in Helgenberger’s blood. After dabbling in high school plays, she went on to major in speech at Northwestern, graduating in 1982. That same year, and ABC talent scout lured her to New York City, where she landed a role on the daytime soap ‘Ryan’s Hope.’
In 1987 she costarred in a short-lived sitcom called ‘Shell Game.’ “That got me to L.A. and reintroduced me to my future husband,” says Helgenberger of Rosenberg, now 50, whom she’d first encountered a few years earlier when he had a small part on ‘Ryan.’ This time they met in a bank. “I was unemployed,” he says. “She was making a deposit, I was making a withdrawal.”
“That’s still what’s happening,” adds Helgenberger with a laugh. “We exchanged numbers,” says Rosenberg, “and she actually called me, and we went out.” Weeks later they moved in together and in 1989 tied the knot in San Francisco. “I’m Catholic, he’s Jewish, and it was just easier to elope,” she explains.
Rosenberg would go on to costar in ‘Civil Wars,’ ‘L.A. Law’ and ‘Cybill.’ Helgenberger, meanwhile, had already scored her Emmy-winning role as hooker K.C. on the Vietnam War series ‘China Beach’ (1988-91). “Women loved that part ’cause K.C. was just sassy,” she says.
When son Huey was born in 1990, Helgenberger took him to the set with her. But the juggling act got trickier when she began going on location for feature films including ‘Species’ and ‘Fire Down Below.’ “Before Huey was 5, I could take him with me,” she says. Now, though, “he has sports and lessons and friends, and it’s not fair to remove him from his whole life.”
Which explains her decision to return to series TV. “I’ll give the producers a heads-up—’Parent-teacher conference, I need the afternoon off’—and most of the time they’re accommodating,” Helgenberger says. She has also found time to serve as team mother to Huey’s basketball squad and to oversee his drum lessons. “She insists that he be musical,” Rosenberg says, “and she sits with him for hours every week.”
Even on the ‘CSI’ set, “she talks about her son all the time,” says costar William Petersen. Adds executive producer Carol Mendelsohn: “At the end of the day she goes home to her family. That’s what I admire about Marg.” And the family may still grow. “We would love to have other children,” Helgenberger says. “It hasn’t happened. We haven’t been lucky enough.”
In the meantime, there is a slew of TV corpses to investigate. “By the time May rolls around, I’m probably going to want to spend a month on an island,” she says. “But if Steven Spielberg 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.”