Kathy Baker Goes Beyond `Picket Fences'

Ask Kathy Baker about herself, and the abundantly gifted, Emmy-winning TV star claims she comes in duplicate - "the upper case Kathy Baker and the lower case one."

The "upper case" Baker appears weekly as the crisis-besieged doctor and family woman Jill Brock in the hit TV drama series "Picket Fences." She also has shone in major film roles, holding her own opposite Michael Keaton, Morgan Freeman, Johnny Depp and other heavy hitters.

And she will co-star at Seattle Repertory Theatre Sunday in a gala one-night-only benefit staging of the A.R. Gurney drama "Love Letters," with "Picket Fences" co-star Tom Skerritt. (The 6:30 p.m. show will raise money for the Rep's education programs; for details call 443-2210. )

And what about the "lower case" Kathy Baker?

"She's the one who lived all those years in San Francisco, slicing bologna at the Oakwood Grocery by day and doing theater for nothing at night," the actress says by phone from the Los Angeles home she shares with her manager-husband and two young sons.

Though Baker still identifies with that struggling trouper of earlier days, she stopped earning her living at the deli counter a decade ago.

Fine-etched performances in the films "Clean and Sober," "Street Smart," and "Edward Scissorhands," along with a three-year run in (and Emmy for) "Picket Fences," have kept Baker out of the kitchen. They've also drawn her away from her first love, the stage.

Portraying a troubled WASP princess over a 40-year span in the chamber duet "Love Letters" will mark Baker's first work before a live audience in several years.

"I hope they mike me at the Rep," she confides. "I don't think I have my theater voice anymore."

Not to worry. Those of us who frequented San Francisco playhouses in the early 1980s won't forget Baker's sensitive, and very audible, portrayals in classic dramas and new works. She made her deepest impression in debut versions of Sam Shepard's volatile scripts.

It was, in fact, Baker's sensuous, hot-wired performance in the premiere of Shepard's tempestuous "Fool for Love" that sent her Off Broadway and beyond.

"We thought we'd only be going to New York for a six-week run," she recalls now. "I felt like this little California actress entering the land of great acting, and thought I'd just turn around after and come back home."

"Fool for Love," which co-starred Ed Harris, had received mixed reviews in San Francisco, she recalls, "but in New York everyone went crazy. I won an Obie and other awards. The run kept extending, and all these agents were coming after me. To me it was weird, a fluke."

Success came later

Baker's career path had taken a few unexpected twists before. Reared in New Mexico, she majored in French at the University of California, Berkeley, then trained as a chef at the famed Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris.

Back in San Francisco, haute cuisine soon took a back seat to low-budget theater. And Hollywood fame was "something I never meant to happen. I wanted to be the grande dame of the American stage."

Baker was well into her 30s when she began receiving national acclaim. (Reviewing her in "Clean and Sober," one critic wrote that she "truly wipes everyone else off the screen with her mature sexuality and obvious vulnerability.").

Now in her early 40s, Baker appreciates her relative late-blooming status: "When you're younger, the mental strain of being a successful actor, jumping from role to role, and trying to have some kind of personal life, can really be terrible."

"I honestly don't know if I could have handled success any earlier," she muses. "I heard Tony Bennett say that when you're a big deal early on you have to maintain that level forever, and it's very scary. You have to keep hitting those home runs, turning out hits.

"I'm glad I began in the theater, because there you just keep on plugging."

As a "mature" character actress without a glamor-girl image, Baker did contend with a raft of articles extolling her talent - but describing her pleasant good looks as "plain."

"I've heard that kind of weird backward compliment often - she's so talented, but not pretty," Baker sighs. "Just the other day, someone recognized me from television and was surprised I looked `like a regular person.' I mean, what do they think an actor is? Anyway, being a character actor means I don't have to worry about losing my looks. And I can probably work forever."

Recently, Baker has had her plate full playing the feisty wife of small-town police chief Jimmy Brock (Skerritt) in "Picket Fences." She calls Jill "an everywoman, with kids and a husband. She's very busy, very tired, but very fulfilled. She's a lot like many women I know, a lot like me."

Toiling daily in a TV series allows Baker to "get home in time to tuck my sons in at night." And she appreciates being in one of the handful of dramas on the tube ranked high in quality.

"I honestly think we do great work on `Picket Fences,' " she says. "We all love each other, and love what we're doing. It begins with the writing - (producer-writer) David Kelley's scripts are little gems.

"In a funny way, I think I do well with David's stuff because I did Sam Shepard. Both write in a style of heightened realism, which for me means being in an exaggerated situation but playing everything straight. If Jill's doing brain surgery this week, and going to jail the next, I have to believe it. If I believe it, you'll believe it."

Skerritt rates praise

About her on-screen husband, Seattle resident Skerritt, Baker voices only praise. "Tom is our figurehead. He has this wonderful presence that holds our whole company together.

"Someone said that the first time they saw us work together it looked like we'd been married for 15 years. That wasn't hard for me - talk about generous and encouraging! Tom is really an amazingly kind, gentle, and completely wide-open personality."

It was Skerritt who persuaded Baker to do the "Love Letters" benefit: "He talks so much about Seattle all the time I thought I finally had to see this incredible place."

The actors will only have one brief rehearsal with director Daniel Sullivan before the show. Fortunately, "Love Letters" is a highly portable celebrity vehicle. Two actors read a lifetime of fictive epistles exchanged by childhood friends who (much later) become lovers. As Baker describes it, "The man is kind of staid and staunch, a little corrupt. The woman is a frustrated artist, an alcoholic, a divorcee - she's almost like a Sylvia Plath figure."

In Seattle, Baker says, she'll also enjoy a rare kid-less weekend with her husband. "We hear it's a great city for coffee. That's wonderful, because we love to get up in the morning, read the newspaper over coffee, go out and walk, stop somewhere and have more coffee."

So you might run into the actress at your friendly neighborhood espresso stand soon. That's Kathy Baker, lower-case.