from
the Kentucky Courier-JournalKentucky native loves 'Sordid' role
JULY 30, 2008
When Rosemary Alexander was growing up in rural Kentucky, she didn't really know anyone who was leading a sordid life, but tonight on television she plays one of the sorriest characters you'll ever meet.
Alexander is Dr. Eve Bollinger in the new TV version of the movie and play "Sordid Lives." It shows at 10 tonight on Logo (Insight 176).
Logo is a channel that targets gays, but this series just might attract a broader following because it also stars Olivia Newton-John, Rue McClanahan, Caroline Rhea, Beth Grant, Bonnie Bedelia and Leslie Jordan from "Will & Grace." Jordan plays the object of Alexander's character's obsession.
Dr. Eve is the chief psychiatrist at the Big Spring Texas State Mental Institution, Alexander explained in a phone interview from Los Angeles, where she lives.
"The character is career-driven and bent on getting on 'Oprah,' and her method of achieving that glory is to develop her theory of dehomosexualization," said Alexander. "She's trying to dehomosexualize the gayest man in the world (Jordan) who thinks he's Tammy Wynette or channels Wynette while he's dressed in drag."
It's a world far removed from the one in which Alexander, 67, grew up in Kentucky.
"I'm from a pioneer family in Lincoln County around Kings Mountain near the Cumberland Gap," she said. "It's a treasured memory because I lived back in the hills; I guess you would call them knobs. We had no electricity, no plumbing, no paved roads. We lived off the garden and raised pigs and sugar cane," Alexander recalled. "It was a wonderful time."
Her father was a farmer.
"There were constantly floods and bugs, and he went to Detroit to work in the automobile factories, so we moved when I was 9 from Moccasin Creek to Detroit."
Later, she went to Michigan State University and wound up meeting and marrying a man from Texas. They moved to Dallas, where she got involved with theater. "Eventually I met a man who was my soul mate (Newell Alexander, who played in the film 'Sordid Lives') and we moved to Los Angeles together to be actors," she said.
Thirty-some years and five children later she has made good on her goal of acting in lots of plays, scads of TV shows and doing voiceovers for animated films. The day of our interview she was off to voice animal parts in "Madagascar 2."
But her role in "Sordid Lives" is one of the nuttiest things she's ever done.
"It's pretty crazy. I've played even darker characters … but this one is kind of warped. The character is kind of mean-spirited and evil, and I've never played someone like that before."
The over-the-top show is played for laughs, though, and her role is straight. "I'm the straight lady for Jordan. I set him up because everything he does is funny, but I've learned along the way to get some laughs out of it too."
The humor, she said, is sometimes the key to what attracts people to playwright Del Shores' works. "When we first did the play in Los Angeles, Del had just come out as a gay man, but our audience for about a year was a straight theater crowd."
The movie (released in 2001) wasn't particularly targeted at gay audiences, although "they eventually found it," Alexander recalled. "Our next big demographic was older people, and there were lots of articles about gays and grays liking it." She's also done another Shores production called "Southern Baptist Sissies," which she describes as "an amazing play."
" 'Southern Baptist Sissies' takes a far more serious look at sexuality," she said. "It deals with young men who grow up gay in a very conservative fundamentalist church in the South. It's about how their minister deals and how their mothers deal with them," Alexander said.
"It's about their struggle to heal, love and accept in a society when you're told you're queer, that you're going to hell and burn in a lake of fire," she said. Alexander plays three of the men's mothers.
She has played a lot of real and unreal parts over the years in films and on television too. Her movie credits include "Titanic," "Jerry Maguire," "Jumanji," "Erin Brockovich" and "The Insider."
Her television parts range from "Days of Our Lives" to "Murder, She Wrote," with "Dallas," "Knots Landing" and "Chicago Hope" in between. She did "Las Vegas" last season. "That was fun," she said, but her favorite TV show was "Highway to Heaven."
"I loved it because I got to work with Michael Landon, and he was really dear, sweet, kind and loving, and my experience on that show was wonderful." In her second place is "Designing Women." "It was so sharp and funny," she said.
She and her husband have also done radio drama.
"Radio was my theater when I was a kid," she said. After they worked with some other actors on a radio show, they thought it might be fun to try to develop some programs just for radio but found there wasn't much market when they shopped the idea around.
"People said, 'I don't know if you're ahead of your time or behind your time, but nobody wants long-form radio anymore.' "
A year later, they met legendary entertainer and businessman Gene Autry, who encouraged them to do it. "We wrote a show called 'Christmas in El Paso.' Autry and the people at his museum loved it, and they went on to do a series (at Autry's museum) for a decade."
When they first went to Los Angeles, the Alexanders did commercials and industrial films as a way of supporting their growing family. Now that the kids are adults, they're doing more of what they want to do. Tonight "Sordid Lives" tops that list.
(Rosemary's Alexanders reviews from a 1980's production of Del Shores' Daddy's Dyin Who's Got The Will?)
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