‘When I look in the mirror, I get the biggest kick': Christine Baranski

Sydney Morning Herald

03-05-2025

This story is part of the May 4 edition of Sunday Life. See all 13 stories.
On June 20, 1972, a production of Hamlet opened at New York's Delacorte Theatre. It starred Stacy Keach as Hamlet and James Earl Jones as Claudius. Somewhere up the back was Christine Baranski, barely 20 years old, in the role of a lady-in-waiting.
'I thought that was my destiny, absolutely my destiny to be there,' Baranski says. 'I was going to study as hard as I could, and I was going to be a part of that world. I was not aspirational in terms of TV or film – it was all about being a great theatre actor and holding my own on stage with these greats.'
Living on the east coast of the United States, she rejected the allure of Hollywood. 'I didn't have any desire to be a sitcom actress. It was like, you give up your theatre career and then that's it, you go commercial. It's an entirely different way of thinking now, of course. But I held out.'
Like any great actor, however, she wasn't so much holding out as letting the audience's appetite manifest. Christine Baranski is a statuesque 177 centimetres, but enters a room with the presence of a woman even taller. At 72, she remains formidable.
She sparkled in the film Mamma Mia! as Tanya Chesham-Leigh. And as Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife, and later The Good Fight, she captured the zeitgeist, exuding intellectual brilliance and a rare kind of elegance. But the lady herself seems a universe away from – to borrow a line from the film Chicago, which she also appeared in – all that razzle-dazzle.
Baranski and I first met on the set of The Good Wife and crossed paths a second time while she was promoting The Good Fight. Now, on opposite coasts of the US, we are catching up on Zoom to discuss her latest role, as Victoria in the second season of Nine Perfect Strangers.
'What jazzes me when I get a phone call [about a project] is, of course, who's in it,' Baranski says. In this case, the attraction is creator and director David E. Kelley, working off the book by Australian author Liane Moriarty, with Nicole Kidman in the lead role of Masha Dmitrichenko.
'There were all kinds of wonderful morsels of excitement, including Nicole reprising her role,' says Baranski. 'And then my agents told me some of the actors involved, which was terribly exciting and remains exciting.'
The project was filmed in Europe, on sound stages in Munich and on location in the Austrian Alps. 'I am a music lover and an opera lover, so you can imagine, I just inhaled history,' Baranski says. 'When I wasn't acting, I was very much a traveller. I had a lot of reasons to be excited about this project.'
After we scrub away the spoilers, what we can say about her character, Victoria, is this: she comes into Masha's orbit hoping to reconnect with her daughter. 'I have raised daughters and I know the topography of a mother-daughter relationship: how complicated it can be, how challenging, how much love there is despite the difficulties,' Baranski says.
'Victoria is a woman with a past, many marriages, many divorces, lots of travel, she had money, she didn't have money, she loves her gorgeous clothes,' Baranski adds, check-listing Victoria's favourite brands: Wagner, Armani and Italian fashion house Etro. 'She's very worldly. She's wonderfully witty. There was a lot to work with as an actress.'
Baranski's own worldliness and wit can be tracked back to childhood. She lost her father, newspaper editor Lucien Baranski, at the age of eight, and was raised by her mother and grandmother. The family lived in Cheektowaga, a suburb of Buffalo, New York. The Big Apple beckoned, but it took a lot of grit to get into New York City's prestigious Juilliard School of performing arts. She was knocked back the first time, but got her foot in the door at her second try.
Following graduation, there were small roles in TV staples like Law & Order, and the films Reversal of Fortune (1990) and The Birdcage (1996). Then, in the mid-1990s, came the sitcom Cybill, which starred Cybill Shepherd (Baranski played Maryann, the Patsy to Shepherd's Edina). And after that Chicago (2002), Mamma Mia! (2008) and Into the Woods (2014).
On TV, she brought her droll wit to The Big Bang Theory as Johnny Galecki's on-screen mother, and between 2009 and 2022 she portrayed strong-willed litigator Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife and The Good Fight. She currently plays Agnes Van Rhijn in the period drama The Gilded Age.
But for Baranski, her most transformational role has been away from the camera, raising two daughters: Isabel, now a lawyer, and Lily, who followed her mother into acting. 'In the deepest possible way, [motherhood] transforms you,' she says.
Motherhood also gave her an immediate bond with Nicole Kidman. 'We went right to talking about our children,' Baranski says. 'Her mother [Janelle, who passed away last September] was ailing at the time, and I shared with her the story of my mother's illness and how difficult it was as a daughter to lose my mother.'
The pair also discussed the difficulties of working in remote locations, away from family. 'The bond is immediate, so immediate, because of this common feeling that you are always torn,' says Baranski. 'You're enraptured by your children, but you're also enslaved, because you always feel you should be there for them and you feel guilty if you're not there when they're growing up.
'It's something I've talked about to so many actresses who have children. The bond is so profound and the mother-daughter relationship is so complex because women are complicated beings.'
Baranski should know – she has played many complicated women. 'They're all aspects of me,' she says. 'And I am delighted when people come up to me, especially young women or young girls, and they get excited about Tanya [in Mamma Mia! ] and that woman dancing on the beach with the guys. I'm like, 'Yeah, I was that woman. I was dancing with all those guys on the beach.' '
Diane Lockhart, she says, is the woman she aspired to be, 'a woman who was perfectly comfortable in a man's world and who had an ethical centre. She was smarter than I, she was tougher than I, she was more confident than I was … so I had the pleasure of inhabiting a character that, in a perfect world, I would be.'
She says her work also seeks to hold up a mirror to our own experiences and feelings. Mamma Mia! perhaps lives at the lighter end of the spectrum. But The Gilded Age, for example, is a glittering soap opera set in a world of extraordinary wealth which serves as a dark mirror of the USA's social and cultural origins.
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Nine Perfect Strangers is an ambitious work, too. 'I am loath to say it's about any one thing; people will take away what they want,' Baranski says. 'But I think, in the wake of The White Lotus and what that dealt with rather brilliantly – people having existential crises over the way in which they are living – a piece like Nine Perfect Strangers tells the stories of these lives, these wounded human beings.
'People are captivated by stories about people who have suffered trauma or are working through trauma and trying to come through into some place of healing,' she adds. 'That's very simplistic, but that's Masha's intention. People are looking for restoration, looking to be healed and to be taken psychologically to a new place where they're able to rid themselves of the darkness.'
And Baranski herself? 'I find such humour and delight in the fact that I am a girl from Buffalo, New York. I grew up skinny. I had bad skin. I was brought up by Catholic nuns. And my mom worried about money all the time.
'Yet somehow, when I look in the mirror or see images of myself as this sophisticated character or this grand dame or these sexy, foxy ladies, who are witty and well-dressed and all, I get the biggest kick. Because underneath all of that is this Buffalo girl who still cheers for the Buffalo Bills football team. It's a pretty great journey.'