Jessica Walter has been playing TV moms for quite some time. "All I know is that, usually, when my agent calls me in, let's say, the past 20 years, I always say, 'Okay, whose mother will I be now?'" she says, laughing. "But I've had great luck with my TV children, especially the daughters."
Walter was mom to such small-screen offspring as Cynthia Stevenson in the Lifetime sitcom Oh Baby and Laura San Giacomo in the hit comedy series Just Shoot Me!. These days you can see her as boozy matriarch Lucille Bluth on Fox's wickedly funny Arrested Development. Walter has been nominated for an Emmy in the Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series category, and it's easy to see why: Lucille is a vibrant, acidic creation, a mother who schemes against her children but still cares for them in her own twisted way. Walter says she took to the role immediately. "When I read the pilot, I loved the whole script. And when I read the scene to go on tape from New York, I cannot explain it, but it just clicked," she says. "I absolutely understood this woman, and I liked her. I didn't think she was an evil, horrible person, and I still don't. I understood the desperation. I got it; I heard the music."
And Walter adores her onscreen brood: needy daughter Lindsay (Portia de Rossi), outlandish Gob (Will Arnett), perennial straight man Michael (Jason Bateman), and mama's boy Buster (Tony Hale), with whom Lucille shares many of her most hilarious scenes. "Oh, my God, am I lucky!" she says. "First of all, I love Portia de Rossi; she's a wonderful girl, she's a terrific lady. Jason Bateman, that little twinkle in his eye, you could just faint. Will Arnett [is] our handsome hunk. And I must tell you, it's a privilege to work with Tony Hale—he's so wonderful, and he makes those scenes really work."
So what, in Walter's opinion, makes for a compelling TV mother? "You gotta have good writing. If it ain't on the page, it ain't on the stage," she says.
With that, Back Stage West asked Walter to name her top-five favorite TV moms.
Jean Stapleton as Edith Bunker on All in the Family
"I loved that show, and I love that character. She was so wonderful. We really learned lessons from Edith. In all her naiveté, she was dumb like a fox."
Joan Collins as Alexis Carrington Colby on Dynasty
"She was so gorgeously evil. It's everybody's fantasy to be that way."
Barbara Bel Geddes as Miss Ellie on Dallas
"She's a brilliant actress, and there was something so grounded about her performance. I think that if you didn't have Miss Ellie—the goodness of Miss Ellie—the badness of those other characters, [such as] J.R., wouldn't have paid off. You had to see the good with the bad."
Nancy Marchand as Livia Soprano on The Sopranos
"One of my absolute faves in the world. Talk about evil, twisted, crazed—notice I go for that. I thought she was brilliant."
Sada Thompson as Kate Lawrence on Family
"A wonderful actress and just everybody's fantasy mom. And James Broderick, who is Matthew's father, was the husband. [They were] kind of like a Norman Rockwell–type family. Everybody's fantasy was, 'Ooh, I want that, too.'"