Julianna Flexes Her Muscles

Since leaving ER - she famously turned down millions to stay - Julianna Margulies has set her sights on movie stardom. Here she tells Jane Gordon about starring with Pierce Brosnan in Evelyn, and her plans to rekindle the chemistry with her ER love-interest George Clooney on the big screen.

No one sitting in the small café in the fashionable Chelsea district of New York seems to notice the dark-haired woman who has just come through the door. It's difficult to work out if this is because everyone here is either too cool or too eccentric to be interested in anyone else, of if – like me - they have just failed to recognise Julianna Margulies. It is, you see, very hard to equate the delicate beauty in front of me in a black Rodriguez shirt, jeans and high Jimmy Choo boots with Nurse Hathaway, the television character that made her famous, in her pink ER scrubs.
"Oh, I only look like this because I just came from the studio and they spent two hours doing my face and hair ," Julianna says, as if, too, can barely recognise herself. "It used to take me 16 minutes to do Carol Hathaway's make-up on ER, because she would never have spent time on the way she looked. It was funny, because as the show went on, new people were being hired and these girls were taking two hours to get ready, and I thought, wait a minute, this isn't the show I signed up for; it's a beauty show. I understand why they do it; there is a pressure for women to be more and more beautiful. But I think it's up to women to stop and say, `Hey, I worked hard for my smile lines.'
It's probably true to say that 36-year old Julianna owes her success in television to the fact that she doesn't conform to the cosmetically cloned norm of the contemporary actress. She was initially booked only for the pilot show of ER – at the end of which her character was to commit suicide – because her looks were deemed too `strong' for public taste. But audience reaction to her character was so positive that she was brought back from the brink of death to become the `soul' of the series for six years.
Fours years ago, she turned down a reported $27 million deal and left the show, walking off into the sunset with Dr Doug Ross, Nurse Hathaway's love interest, played by George Clooney. Buy while she has not stopped working during that time , she has not yet achieved the kind of screen stardom that her great friend and former co-star Clooney (who left a series before her and only returned to ER for one last episode `to get Julianna out') has attained in Hollywood.
"It's hard for women in movies because unless you are one of the top five actresses, you end up in the supporting role as the wife or the girlfriend. So you think, OK, then I'll find the right wife or girlfriend in the right movie . I have been fortunate to work with great directors and great leading men, playing, er, wives or girlfriends," she says with a self-deprecating laugh.
It is in just such a role that Julianna will next be seen in Evelyn, which opens this month, although she does extend a much more convincing Irish accent than his (and he was born there). But it was Brosnan's passion for the true story of a father's fight for the custody of his children against church and state that persuaded Julianna to take on the role: "I want to be a part of something that has some sort of meaning, however big or small", she says. "Plus, I got to go to Ireland – it was like being paid to go on vacation . I lived in England for the biggest chunk of my childhood, although I'd never been to Ireland before, and my best friend from my Sussex school days, Rowena, came and spent some time with me."
The youngest of three daughters born to American-Jewish parents, Julianna spent much of her childhood flying back and forth across the Atlantic. Her parents – her father was a creative director in advertising and her mother was a ballet dancer – parted when she was 18 months old in a way that was so amicable ("I don't think they even consulted a lawyer") that, when her father was posted to Paris a year later, his ex-wife and children went with him. After three years, her mother – a complete Anglophile – took her daughters to Forest Row in Sussex, where Julianna was based (between trips to see her father who had remarried and relocated to New York) until she was 16.
The contrast between her life with her unconventional, hippie mother – who banned TV, junk food and plastic toys ("you don't know how much I craved a Barbie") – and her glamorous holidays with her father in New York left her with issues that she is still trying to resolve. Throughout her childhood she has a longing to conform to what she saw as the normal white picket fence family life that eluded her.
The things she misses most from her time in Sussex are mid-afternoon tea and toast ("Americans don't get the idea of tea and toast, everything is Starbucks on the go") and the friends she made at Michael Hall Steiner School , Forest Row. Although she says that she felt physically out of place ("everyone was so bland and they didn't have any hair on their arms or legs – that was the only point in my life when I really felt Jewish"), she established a number of deep friendships. Every year Rowena, who she first met in nursery school , hosts a reunion at her Sussex home for their core group of school friends .
"Rowena and I were always best friends ," says Julianna. "I went back to Britain when I was 18 and we spent our gap year together in London . I worked in Friends in South Molton Street, which was Nicole Farhi's shop , and Rowena worked next door in a shoe shop Bertie. We shared this squalid flat in Chelsea and we would go in Sainsbury's and count out our pennies for a loaf of bread. Then I went to university in New York and Rowena went to art school in Sussex."
Julianna is not sure what exactly fired her desire to be an actress but since her eldest sister Alexandra has inherited her mother's talent for ballet and her middle sister Rachel had opted to be a musician, the last performing art – acting – was an obvious choice for the youngest child in such a theatrical family . She studied drama, art history and literature at the prestigious Sarah Lawrence College in New York, and success, she now admits, came more easily than she imagined. There was a short period of waitressing between acting jobs , but small roles in off –Broadway shows and regular work in commercials led – within five years of her graduation – to ER.
Along the way, in 1991, at an acting class in New York, she met her boyfriend Ron Eldard, whom she immediately thought was "the Marlon Brando of his generation." She doesn't like talking about her relationship (she told one interviewer, "If you want a love story go to a video rental store") and she believes that one of the reasons why it has been so enduring has been her silence on the subject. Ron – who starred alongside Julianna in the recent ill-fated Ghost Ship (which sank without trace) – is just breaking through into the big roles she thinks he's born to play (he is currently working on a movie with Ben Kingsley). The couple have a house in Santa Monica and an apartment in New York, an arrangement that allows Julianna to remain close to both her sisters. Alexandra who lives in Los Angeles and runs a fashion business and Rachel the musician who lives in New York (both have two daughters).
Home is hugely important to Julianna, and she is at her happiest having tea and toast with Ron and the two Abyssinia cats that he brought into the relationship ("but heaven forbid, if anything should happen, he'd have to fight me for them"). The couple have a rule that they will never be apart for more than three weeks "because you have to respect your relationship." She is, she says, getting her head round the idea of having children but in the immediate future is more likely to be making movies , rather than babies, with Ron.
"I can always tell when an actor is a born director," says Julianna. "And Ron is a born director. Sometimes at home he can be listening to something, writing something down and be on the phone simultaneously. I am in awe of that, I want Ron to direct me one day because he knows me so well, he knows how to reach me in a way no other director could."
Julianna remains very much in contact with the core caste she worked with for six years on ER – Eriq LaSalle, Noah Wyle, Anthony Edwards, Laura Innes, Alex Kingston and George Clooney are, in a sense, as soundly bonded to Julianna by their confinement together on an LA set 15 hours a day, five days a week, ten months of the year as her school friends from Sussex.
"George is the kind of guy that I could call up at 4am if I was in trouble and I know that he would be there in a second and vice versa," she says. "Laura's back yard backs on to my back yard in New York, and Alex is a great friend. Noah has had a baby , and I knitted him a sweater, and Eriq and I e-mail all the time . It's difficult to get us all together as a group, but just before Christmas , we met up at the memorial service for our make-up artist. Even though it was in tragic circumstances – ha was so young – it was really beautiful to see everyone and there were still those same feelings of family", she says.
One way Julianna might finally escape the wife or girlfriend roles and achieve the movie star status she so deserves is in a possible collaboration with George Clooney. The tow actors had equal status on ER and their relationship was the linchpin of the series at the height of its success. "We have talked about it a lot. George had said that it would be great to call on that chemistry again, but we knew we would have to leave ER because otherwise it would just be Hathaway and Ross. I am sure we will do something together again one day, " says Julianna.

Meanwhile, her life is pretty full – she is currently filming a miniseries about Hitler alongside Robert Carlyle. She also sees a lot of her parents who have – ironically – both ended up living in he same small town in Massachussetts. She admits that more and more nowadays she is grateful, not regretful, of her odd upbringing. "They live about 16 minutes from each other but they don't socialise" says Julianna. "It's funny. I was working on a play close to Mom's home a while ago and I took my washing to her house , loaded the machine and went to sleep, and when I woke there was this unbelievable sight – my mom ironing my clothes. I shouted, "Mom, what are you doing? All my life this has been my dream." And she said, "You know, I think I am ready to be the mother you always wanted." I realised then that what you want as a kid is not necessarily what you need. If I had been brought up in a closed, traditional family , I doubt that I would have become an actress. My parents gave me love and confidence and strength and I think those are the things that I take into my work – they are the qualities that Hathaway had and that, hopefully, I can take on to the roles I have yet to play."