Jean Smart Shares the One Role She’d Love to Revisit: ‘I Would Kill to Play a Part Like That Again’
variety.comEmily Longeretta Ahead of her Hollywood Walk of Fame honor, icon Jean Smart looked back at some of her incredible roles — including the one that put her on the map globally.
In 1985, she joined CBS’ “Designing Women” as Charlene Frazier Stillfield, a role she held for five seasons.The sitcom earned 18 Emmy nominations and catapulted Smart’s career — and she completely knows why.“There weren’t a lot of shows that were just about women back then.
Linda [Bloodworth-Thomason] is such a good writer that she made the characters so distinct from each other,” she says. “A lot of times, back in the day on sitcoms, you could practically all trade lines and nobody could tell the difference.
The jobs are kind of all the same.” Since this show was different, it had a staying power others didn’t. “She was very specific about our characters,” says Smart. “She would do another thing that nobody did back then: Give us page-long monologues.
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