WOMEN WE LOVE: MARG HELGENBERGER
Esquire Magazine
unknown 2002
by Lewis Fairchild
The average fan of ‘CSI’ probably tunes in to try to solve the whodunit, or maybe to enjoy the trademark money shots of maggots crawling around bloated, mutilated corpses. But for me, the real draw is the dissonance of the elegant Marg Helgenberger – tall, thin, with well-tended red hair and cheekbones that could slice provolone – playing TV’s toughest dame. I love the crisp, unsmiling delivery of her lines. (“He put you in the the graybar? Sounds like motive to me.”) I love that she sent her mentor up the river. And I love that this forty-two-year-old Nebraska-born wife and mother sounds like she’s just as tough in real life – that she apparently took no guff from Steven Seagal on a movie set, that she has said she’s happy to be called a badass or a brick house. And I don’t even mind the name, which I’m willing to wager is the least sexy, least pronounceable one in the history of Women We Love. As someone – I think it was Fyvush Finkel – once said, What’s in a name?
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