MARG HELGENBERGER GETS DOWN AND DIRTY
Biography Magazine
February 2002
by Joe Dziemianowicz
How would you like to slide down a garbage chute? When Marg Helgenberger was posed that question by the executive producer of the CBS whodunit drama ‘CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,’ she had a simple response: “I’d love to.”
No surprise. The 43-year old actress has never been afraid to get her hands dirty. To help pay for college, she worked in a meat-processing plant, where, dressed in a parka, snowmobile boots, and a hard hat, she’d “trim hair, grease, abscesses, whatever,” off of huge swinging sides of sirloin. “It was not very attractive or exciting,” she recalls with a hearty laugh, “and it was grueling.”
It was also just the sort of character-building experience that helped, well, beef up her portrayals of strong, unconventional women – whether a hooker who bonds with the members of a M.A.S.H. unit in Vietnam, a wife who hires a hit on her husband, a mother accused of murdering her daughter, or a cancer victim battling the companies that poisoned her water supply. And her latest role makes hosing down meat seem like a day at the spa: ‘CSI’’s criminologist Catherine Willows is a tough, smart, sexy single mom and ex-stripper who deals with dead bodies on the graveyard shift. “Sometimes on the set we rate which corpse had it the worst,” says Helgenberger. “If it’s a badly decaying thing, that usually means there’s bugs and maggots. Ugh. If that’s not gross, I don’t know what is.”
She’s the first to admit that there’s a pattern to her parts. “I play all sorts of law enforcement types,” she notes. “I either play cops or criminals – I’m either on the right side of the law or the wrong side. I gravitate toward edgier material because it suits my nature,” she explains. “I find it fascinating to pay. I’m just that kind of person.”
That kind of person was raised far from that kind of life, in the tiny farming community of North Bend, Nebraska (population 1200). She was born Mary Marg Helgenberger on November 16, 1958. Her father, Hugh (who died in 1986 after a struggle with multiple sclerosis), worked as a government meat inspector; her mother, Kay, a nurse, named her after an orphaned baby she met during her RN training. “I was always called by my middle name,” says Helgenberger, who notes that Marg has always been – and still is – mispronounced. For the record: The “g” is hard, as in “cargo,” not soft, as in “large” – which inspired the tongue-in-cheek title of the actress’s production company, Don’t Call Me Marge, Inc.
Helgenberger grew up in a “very loving household,” along with her older sister, Ann, and a younger brother, Curt (who, following in their father’s footsteps, is a government meat inspector). “It was a lot of fun,” she says. “My parents were cool. It was the house where everyone used to hang out after football games, dances, and homecoming.”
But by the time she hit junior high, life in a rural community – where, she laughs, “the two tallest buildings in town were, and still are, the water tower and the grain elevator” – inspired her to daydream about life in other parts of the country. “It’s probably why I aspired to the mountains and beaches,” she says. “God bless Nebraska – I love the state – but it’s boring. There’s not a lot to do, especially in wintertime.”
She kept herself busy by watching old movies and filling her schedule with assorted extracurricular activities – including acting. “In my first public performance I was a flower,” she recalls. “The first time I had a featured solo I was a swan.” That impressive flora-to-fauna stretch may have been an early indication of her versatility, but strutting around onstage was just a lark. She planned to follow in her mother’s footsteps and study nursing.
“I excelled in science and took all the required classes,” she says. But she was more interested in liberal arts and, in her senior year, she opted to pursue humanities at Kearney State College (now called the University of Nebraska, Kearney). Even there, her priorities were clear: “I was doing plays all the time and going to class occasionally,” she confesses.
After two years, she transferred to the prestigious speech department at Chicago’s Northwestern University (partially to be with a then-boyfriend). While there, she played Blanch DuBois in a school production of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire – and, for the first time, she seriously imagined pursuing a full-fledged acting career. “It’s an incredibly challenging part,” she says. “And I did a pretty good job. I was convinced that if I could handle that part, then I could probably make a living at this business.”
In June 1981, her performance as cantankerous Kate in ‘The Taming of the Shrew’ drew the attention of an ABC talent scout in the audience The scout interviewed Helgenberger the next day and asked if she’d be interested in doing a soap opera. The aspiring actress was tempted, but graduation was just six months away. “She said, ‘I’m going to call you when you’re done,’” Helgenberger recalls. “And she did.”
Lucky for her. In 1982, two weeks after she graduated, Helgenberger left the Windy City and breezed into New York to join the cast of ‘Ryan’s Hope,’ on which she played undercover cop Siobhan Ryan for three and a half years. “Soap acting was a good experience for the most part,” she says. “The first year is exciting. After that it was a grind, a new script every single day. I don’t think I’d shock anyone by saying the material wasn’t terribly inspired.” Still, one memorable storyline in which Siobhan masqueraded as a hooker foreshadowed her star-making turn as a heroin-addicted prostitute K.C. in the Vietnam War-era drama ‘China Beach,’ which debuted on ABC in 1988.
Her corn-fed good looks coupled with her wilder, worldly side made her a shoo-in for the showy role. “Marg could loll in a doorway like Lauren Bacall and the great actresses of the ‘40s,” says ‘Beach’ creator John Sacret Young, who later worked with her on two TV movies, ‘Keys’ (1994) and ‘Thanks of a Grateful Nation’ (1998). “She had such edgy cynicism and savvy it was remarkable to watch. She was so cool – yet there were always fires burning inside.”
In other words, she was hot stuff – and critics took notice. In 1990, Helgenberger won a Best Supporting Actress Emmy for her efforts, which, she notes, gave her the ability to “pick and choose roles” on TV and, to a lesser degree, in films.
After ‘China Beach’ sailed off in 1991, though, she didn’t always pick and choose so wisely, appearing in a series of forgettable flicks (like ‘Bad Boys,’ ‘My Fellow Americans,’ and the Steven Seagal burnout ‘Fire Down Below’) and schlocky TV movies (‘Death Dreams,’ ‘Lie Down with Lions,’ ‘Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers’) Not that she regrets her roles. Debbie Banister, her character in the 1993 miniseries ‘When Love Kills,’ “was a sexy, sassy, manipulative sociopath, the most selfish person I’ve ever played,” the actress says. “She was so bad it was fun.” She even managed to add depth and nuance to Patsy Ramsey – ‘that’ Patsy Ramsey – in 2000’s ‘Perfect Murder, Perfect Town.’ “I was thinking she was a bad mother because she put her daughter in pageants and dressed her up like a tart,” she says. But once she landed the part, “I had to clean the slate and start from scratch. I’m glad I did because it made me see my own prejudices and judgements. But it was hard, very emotional.”
In recent years, her career’s come back to the ‘Beach’ line. ‘Species’ was a sci-fi smash in 1995; she reprised her role as Dr. Laura Baker in a 1998 sequel. And she played doctor with George Clooney’s Doug Ross on several episodes of ‘ER’ in 1996. Last year, Helgenberger gave her highest profile performance to date (until ‘CSI,’ that is) in ‘Erin Brockovich,’ as Donna Jensen, a woman simultaneously fighting cancer and powerful corporations. The role was fraught with emotion for Helgenberger,: Her mother is a longtime breast cancer survivor. As a result, she says, “I knew I could play it.”
But as busy as she is, her offscreen hours are equally booked. In 1983, she met actor Alan Rosenberg (best known for roles on ‘L.A. Law’ and ‘Cybill,’ and now playing child advocate Alvin Masterson on the CBS drama ‘The Guardian’) on the set of ‘Ryan’s Hope,’ where he was shooting a month-long stint . A few years later they ran into each other at a bank in California – she was making a deposit, he a withdrawal – and hit it off. They began dating, and, in 1989, decided to cash in on their chemistry, eloping to the Huntington Hotel in San Francisco. Marg’s sister, Ann, was the only guest. “I never fantasized about a big wedding,” says Helgenberger.
The couple has an 11-year-old son, Hughie – and fortunately, one advantage of doing a TV series is actually being able to come home at night. “Oh, God, that location stuff was killing me,” she groans. “I was spending way too much time away from home. We shoot ‘CSI’ in Santa Clarita. I have long hours but it’s just a 45-minute car ride home.”
During a rare, genuine day off, she chills out at her Mediterranean-style house (originally built for silent film cowboy star William S. Hart), takes yoga classes, or sees a friend for lunch and maybe a movie. But she has fun on the set too: “Doing a really awesome scene,” she says, “could make me feel jazzed for weeks.”
‘CSI’ executive producer Carol Mendelsohn isn’t surprised to hear the actress express such enthusiasm. “You can tell Marg loves to come to work,” she says. Castmate Gary Dourdan, who plays fellow investigator Warrick Brown, agrees, calling Helgenberger “hands down, a pro. I call her Margalicious,” he says. “She brings a real sexuality to her role, a bit of rough edge. She’s gotten around in the business and tells some pretty funny stories about working with certain people. But when the cameras roll, she’s all business.”
With ‘CSI’ a certifiable hit, those cameras will be rolling – and the actress will be checking out corpses – for the foreseeable future. But make no mistake: There are other, more glamorous parts on Helgenberger’s wish list. “I’d love to be able to do Blanche DuBois again,” she says. “One of my goals is to revisit that character. And I’d really love to do a Broadway musical, just to have that experience. Of course, I haven’t done a musical since college,” she says with a smile. “But anything’s possible.”
FYI: She certainly can’t be accused of any diva-like display of her 1990 Emmy statuette: It’s tucked away on a top shelf in her den. “I haven’t even looked at it in years,” she confesses. “I bet it needs a good polishing!”
*A scan of this article can also be found here.