Jean Smart 'would kill' to play a role like Designing Women's Charlene again
Jean Smart "would kill" to play another role like Charlene Frazier Stillfield.
The 70-year-old actress starred as "sweet and gullible" office manager on the sitcom 'Designing Women' between 1986 and 1991 and admitted that these days she would love to take on a role similar to the late Betty White's character Rose from 'The Golden Girls.'
She said: "I would kill to play a part like that again — someone who’s kind of sweet and gullible. It’s funny, in some ways I see myself more that way than some other roles I’ve played recently. Like a Betty White on ‘The Golden Girls’ kind of part, that’s what I need."
The 'Hacks' star - who is set to be honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Monday (25.04.22) - went on to explain that the Emmy Award winning sitcom was a standout during the 1980s because writer and creator Linda Bloodworth -Thomason is such a "good writer" for women.
She told Variety:"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. 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."
Jean - who starred alongside Dixie Carter, Annie Potts, Meshach Taylor, and Delta Burke in the classic sitcom set at an interior design firm - added that Linda was "very specific" about their characters and made the show "really fun" by writing monologues.
She added: "She was very specific about our characters. She would do another thing that nobody did back then: Give us page-long monologues. Nobody had that in sitcoms, and that really made it fun and made the characters, I think, much more interesting for the audience and much more entertaining."
