MARG HELGENBERGER’S AFFAIR WITH A STRANGER – HER HUSBAND!
Source: www.etonline.com
May 4, 2005
Real-life husband and wife MARG HELGENBERBER and ALAN ROSENBERG heat up the set on “CSI”
Guess who is heating up the set of “CSI” tonight? Catherine Willows (MARG HELGENBERGER) stops by a bar on her way home to relax and finds herself flirting with one of the other customers. What makes it so special is the character, Adam Novak, is played by her real-life husband ALAN ROSENBERG.
“We are playing a cat and mouse thing,” Marg tells ET’s STEVEN COJOCARU. “As the story progresses, he becomes a suspect in this crime that leads us back to the bar where we hooked up.”
The husband and wife have worked together before, but this time they have to display an intimacy that they haven’t shown in any of their previous roles.
“For me it is very unnatural,” Alan says. “People cast husbands and wives and think it brings something extra to the table, that there will be an automatic intimacy there, but we have been together for 18 years. I find it very difficult to be intimate with my wife in front of a room full of people.”
Then a woman, who was also at the bar the same night as Catherine, winds up dead, and Adam becomes the lead suspect. Catherine gets in trouble with Grissom (WILIAM PETERSEN) because she neglects to tell him about her brief encounter with the posssible perp.
So will Adam be back for a second episode?
“I think it would be interesting, if he came back,” Marg says, without revealing if he was guilty or not. “We start out in one place, we come to a place filled with tension and a lot of hate and it would be nice to have a makeup scene.”
Marg and Alan actually met for the first time when he was a day player on “Ryan’s Hope,” on which she was one of the stars. He was married, but he always remembered her.
“I turned into a ‘Ryan’s Hope’ fan,” he admits. “This is naughty, but I remember watching it with my ex-wife. I thought she was such a terrific actress that I got her her first movie audition for ‘Greystoke, the Legend of Tarzan.’ She never knew that I had done that. My brother-in-law was vice president of Warner Bros. and I called him up and said, ‘You’ve got to see her.'”
Years later, the two ran into each other in a bank in West Hollywood. Alan was divorced and still a struggling actor to hear him tell it, and Marg had recently landed a primetime series.
“We exchanged phone numbers, but I was too intimidated to call her,” Alan recalls. “She called me up.”
And the rest, as they say, is history. For more on the “Weeping Willows” episode of CSI, and on Marg and Alan’s real-life romance, tune in to tonight’s ET. “CSI” airs on CBS at 9 p.m.