“Is Cicely joining us after this interview?” Melissa Gilbert asks her publicist.
Reminded that Cicely Tyson, her Sweet Justice co-star, isn’t expected for a safe while … Gilbert lights a cigarette.
“Cicely is very mothering,” Gilbert confides. “She lectures me about smoking and eating right.”
Even at 30, Gilbert, whose Little House on the Prairie premiered 20 years ago, is still being mothered. And not just by a colleague who happens to be twice her age. Many viewers, too, have never quite escaped a certain parental urge. Little Laura Ingalls still lives in their hearts, as does little Melissa Gilbert.
“That’s fine,” says a very grown-up Gilbert, smiling.
But time passes. Time enough not only for nine years of Little House, but also for Gilbert’s made-for-TV movies -28 of them, by her count. (The latest is Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story, in which Gilbert co-stars with Marlee Matlin. It premiered Oct. 5 on Lifetime.)
In the intervening years, there also was a marriage, ushering in what Gilbert once hopefully described as “a white picket fence and a white picket life.”Then a divorce two years ago. Along the way, Gilbert became a mother herself; son Dakota is 5.
On Sweet Justice (9 p.m. Saturdays on NBC), Gilbert plays Kate Delacroy, a Wall Street attorney who returns home to New Orleans and teams up with Carrie Grace Battle (Tyson), an activist lawyer. Together, they fight for the downtrodden and disenfranchised.
Gilbert radiates pride in the show and affection for her fellow actors, who after a long work week she joins many Saturday mornings for tennis in the backyard of Ronnie Cox, who plays her father.
“It’s not just the actors. The crew comes, too. And somebody always brings food.”
Yet all isn’t sweetness on Sweet Justice.
“I’ve never carried a show like this,” says Gilbert, whose other series was the short-lived half-hour sitcom Stand By Your Man in 1992. “It’s very exhausting.
“Fortunately, this week Cicely’s trying the case. I’ll just have to go in and film a love scene, and then I have a few days off.”
Love scene? Despite the highminded, issue-oriented bent of the series, it isn’t all law books and furrowed brow for Kate Delacroy.
“But romance won’t necessarily be with the right guy,” she warns. “In fact, I’m going to get myself into a heap of trouble on the next episode we film – a lot of trouble. I keep making mistakes with men.
“Poor Kate,” she says as she shakes her head. “She has everything, but she can’t seem to get her personal life in order.”
A rueful laugh.
“Sound familiar? I’m playing myself.”
