Whatever happened to the mothers of 1950s television? They were so tender. They were so comforting. We could smell the apples and cinnamon wafting off our TV screens. Nowadays the mothers terrify us. Of course they couldn't unless the actors playing them were stunningly skilled. And leading the pack is the golden-throated, acid-tongued Holland Taylor on Two and a Half Men. She plays Evelyn Harper, mother to playboy Charlie (Charlie Sheen) and buttoned-down Alan (Jon Cryer), grandmother to Jake (Angus T. Jones). M is for the many ways Evelyn appalls us. How her sons even get out of bed each morning, let alone hold jobs, is beyond understanding.
They call it acting for a reason: Taylor seems smarter, much more fun, and much more insecure than Evelyn. But she speaks of Evelyn with affection, almost maternally. Taylor came on as a replacement for Blythe Danner, who had the role on the pilot. According to Taylor, Danner admitted she didn't have a feel for the role. Meanwhile, Mark Roberts, one of Men's writer-producers, had worked with Taylor on a prior series, The Naked Truth, where, she says, "We had all gotten along like puppies in a basket." Roberts told her he was working on a show with gifted show-runner and smart writer Chuck Lorre. Next thing she remembers, she got a sudden call to show up quickly for Lorre's new show. Her mother had recently died, and she went into the meeting feeling distracted. Then the laughing, screaming, yelling began. "And then I got pregnant," she says wryly. "It just sort of happened, as they sometimes do: When you aren't able to focus on trying very hard for something, it falls into your lap."
Evelyn is an ultraconfident, suffer-no-fools woman. The actor, however, showed up to her first read-through thinking, "I stink in this part, I suck, they hate me, I hate me." She says it took her awhile to get comfy. Now she adores everyone on-set. "I know you always hear people say that, but it's really true. Everybody really enjoys everybody, is respectful of everybody, it's simply a lovely group."
Okay, the actors love each other. But how do they react to Evelyn? "I think the person who's playing a terrible person suffers more than others," she says. Indeed, creating the character has been an artistic struggle for her. "I've played characters like this where I was the boss—where I had a focus, something I was engaged in, ordering people around—I'm thinking way back to Bosom Buddies, but also Naked Truth—those characters were rock 'n' roll, rough and tumble, trading insults with the other characters, ultimately pulling rank, enjoying being vicious," she says. "That is easier to play; it must be an alter ego of mine because I excel at that kind of part. This is different because she's sort of a lame duck, the hated-but-tolerated mother. Charlie and Alan really do love their mother—but at a real distance."
Playing a support, she says, an actor comes from a different place. "It's a time-honored job to be a good supporting player. You are necessary. You make the central person be able to stand on his podium in the right way." Sometimes she feels "peripheral," but she notes that's the character's status. "Stylistically this show is about two-and-a-half men, not about two-and-a-half men and their narcissistic mother. So that's a truthful thing to come from."
The writing of course gives her the lead to her character, but, "You bring yourself to it because you can't not bring yourself to it," she says, referring to teachings of her mentor, Stella Adler. Taylor explains, "It's not that I'm not imposing me on this part, it's that I am playing it. It can't help but use me—my responses, my sense of humor, the things that matter to me. I come to the party because I'm the one they invited."
Fear and Loathing Onstage
Taylor has amassed a huge résumé of impressive stage and screen credits, so it's hard to believe she still deals with stage fright. "Years ago I sort of beat it. I had it very badly when I was doing A Delicate Balance with George Grizzard, Kim Hunter, and Pamela Payton-Wright," she recalls. "I would stand in the wings before going on and 'play a tape' of all kinds of positive truths: 'You've been brilliantly reviewed…. Mike Nichols said….' I would run this positive tape in my mind, whether I felt like it or not, whether I believed it or not, so that the negative statements—'You're going to stink in this, they'll hate you the minute you walk onstage, you don't know what you're doing, you're a phony….'—even if you don't believe what you're saying, it prevents the other tape from playing, because they can't play at the same time. And then you find yourself onstage." Filming Men before a live audience, she says, "Sometimes I am quite apprehensive, so I have to do that little trick. I say, 'For God's sake, you've been doing this for 40 years.'"
Yet she finds the TV process, including a substantially shorter rehearsal period, very different from the theatre, "Which is where I'm infinitely happier, not to say I'm unhappy here at all," the actor says. "There you've got a live audience that you're instinctively trying to play for, which often takes your focus away from the camera that you should be sort of thinking about, and your volume should not be projected to that live audience; you're on a mike. So it's a contradictory effort that somebody like Charlie Sheen is a master of. He can roll with the technical difficulties and the technical barriers between him and the audience. He can feel a laugh coming, he can wait for that little artificial mechanical delay that happens for them to see him on the monitor, he can time laughs to come in at the crest of a laugh and still be heard. I marvel at him, and we all do."
She likes the ability to be in charge of her performance in the theatre, responsible for her timing. "And I also think in terms of the proscenium," she says. "I see myself moving in it; I know what I'm expressing and what they're looking at. I know when my character is in focus and when she's not. I know when to be still, when to move. That's my years and years of doing that. And a lot of that inner response is useless in television. It doesn't serve anything."
Taylor misses the one continuous arc of energy of stage roles. "I also like the life," she says. "I don't like going out in the evening to parties; I don't like large gatherings. And there's so much of that in Hollywood. I'm so, so over it. I like small groups of friends. Stockard Channing is a dear, good, loyal, age-old friend and wonderful cook, and every so often she has the usual suspects over for some wonderful dishes she's made. She has big ol' dogs, and there will be eight of us, and it will be the most marvelous evening imaginable. And that's my idea of a good time. But as far as the Hollywood social life, God save me!"
Taylor came to acting early, attending a Quaker boarding school that put on many plays in an old outdoor theatre in a green wood, where Taylor did A Midsummer Night's Dream. "I caught the magic of it all," she recalls. At 16 she got a job in summer stock. "They mainly needed me because I had a little car," she says, but soon she won the juvenile lead in Blue Denim. Then a fellow actor arranged tickets for Sweet Bird of Youth. "I went to the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway and saw Geraldine Page and Paul Newman and Mildred Dunnock and Shirley Knight and Rip Torn—and that put the nail in it," Taylor recalls. "That just nailed it right to the ground."
She attended Bennington College, studying drama, then "stumbled into New York and by fluke" earned a variety of fine roles, opposite her idols, with pay beyond her dreams. But she continued to "stumble around." She says, "I went to various acting teachers and thought, 'I don't get what they're teaching.' There didn't seem to be any codified information that any of them had to give." She says she had been warned that Adler was great but didn't like women. She tried going to the class, "But the registrar, somebody, intimidated me. I didn't pursue it." Years later, when Taylor was about 35, a fellow actor urged her to try Adler. "I went," Taylor says. "My eyes were out on stalks. She was the great genius and the great informer of my life, because she absolutely did have codified information and technique. She would say, 'Acting is doable.' She wasn't talking about talent, she was talking about the way you apply your mind."
For about two years Taylor gave up jobs and took every course Adler offered. And contrary to Adler's reputation, she took Taylor under her wing, and the two became friends.
Now, after years of her own struggles and triumphs, Taylor passes along two solid pieces of advice for new actors—although the advice would seem to apply to all: "If you regard the work as a steppingstone, you aren't living your life," and "I've never known an actor who was a hog who wasn't punished by life." The actor is obviously following both.