Entertainment
Christine Baranski acknowledges past ‘issues’ with co-star Cybill Shepherd: ‘It did get difficult’
The stage and TV star has given some insight into her working relationship with Cybill Shepherd (Picture: Getty)
Christine Baranski has opened up about her relationship with former co-star Cybill Shepherd from their days acting together on the popular 90s sitcom Cybill.
Baranski, until then more of a stage performer, found fame – and an Emmy – as Shepherd’s best friend on the show, which ran for four seasons from 1995 to 1998.
In 71-year-old Shepherd’s 2000 memoir, Cybill Disobedience, she claimed that she and her co-star didn’t get along because Baranski was unfriendly.
Actress Alicia Witt, who played Shepherd’s daughter on the popular series, later said in a 2012 Reddit AMA that Shepherd ‘kinda said some pretty mean things about pretty much everyone she worked with, as I understand’.
Asked about friction between her and Shepherd in an interview with The Guardian, the 69-year-old Mamma Mia! star responded: ‘I have never publicly gone into that. Yes, there were issues, but I prefer to take the higher ground and say, look, that show gave me so much.
‘I was fine working with her. Politically, it did get difficult, but I wish her well.’
Cybill Shepherd was the main part in the sitcom that launched Baranski’s TV career (Picture: Getty)
Baranski played Shepherd’s best friend, Maryann (Picture: CBS via Getty Images)
The show followed a struggling, middle-aged actress (Shepherd) as she attempts to make a career for herself, all while surrounded by her hard-drinking best friend Maryann (Baranski), her two former husbands, and her two daughters.
Over a decade after Cybill’s end, the its writer Chuck Lorre gave Baranski a part on his record-breaking sitcom The Big Bang Theory, as Leonard’s (Johnny Galecki) psychiatrist mother Beverly, for which Baranski scored four more Emmy nominations from her guest appearances (she has 14 Emmy nods overall, since her first win in 1995).
The Broadway veteran has also found great success as fan-favourite liberal lawyer Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife and its current spin-off, The Good Fight.
She’s also leading the cast in Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes’ new period drama The Gilded Age, which takes in New York City ‘s boom years of the 1880s.
The star has moved onto other TV successes, including The Big Bang Theory (Picture: CBS via Getty Images)
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Reflecting on her later success, leading two shows on the cusp of 70, the star added: ‘I can look back and think, “How often did I not get a role because I wasn’t pretty enough?”
‘But look at the position I’m in now – two great roles, [my characters are] both No 1 on the call sheet. I’m like: “Damn! Late 60s and here I am.” There is progress!’
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