She’s notched up five decades as an actress, but Jean Smart is relishing the greatest success of her career yet. At 74, she never expected to be hitting the heights she is at this stage of her life, but her role in the hugely popular comedy Hacks has seen her star soar. Playing wisecracking, queen-of-mean stand-up comedian Deborah Vance, Jean has so far scooped four Emmys, three Golden Globes, three SAGs and four Critics Choice Awards.
And she could be about to make television history. If Jean takes home Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series at this month’s Emmy Awards, it will mark her eighth, tying her with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Cloris Leachman for the most acting Emmy wins by a performer. She would also become the first woman to win an Emmy for every eligible season of the same series.
“I feel like it could have been a little faster,” she laughs.
“But it’s been for the most part a nice, gradual, steady ascent. “Sometimes there are wonderful opportunities that I wish could have come 20 years ago, but far worse would be to have had tons of success young, then have it just all go away. I much prefer being the tortoise than the hare.”
The big break
After cutting her teeth in theatre, Jean landed her first onscreen role in 1979 – a small walk-on part as a “woman bather” in a made-for-TV movie. A string of unremarkable roles followed until she finally got her big break in the 1986 sitcom Designing Women, about a group of workmates at an interior design company.
Despite the regular pay cheque it promised, Jean was torn about signing away five years of her life.
“The night before I decided to take the deal, I cried and cried,” she recalls.
“I’m an actor because I don’t want to do the same thing all the time.”
But sign she did. The show was a hit and when her contract was up, she handed in her notice.
“I thought, ‘This is fun, but not why I became an actor.’”
Never out of work
Over the following years, Jean was never out of work, appearing in movies such as Sweet Home Alabama, I Heart Huckabees and The Accountant, as well as a number of TV shows, including the sitcom High Society, which failed to find an audience.
“If it was on today, it would be a huge hit,” she laughs.
“It was an American version of Ab Fab. My character was a romance novelist – very successful, a total lush and pill popper, who was lusting after her friend’s college-aged son.”
A very Martha moment
Another TV show called Style & Substance also met with an abrupt end.
“It was basically a takeoff of Martha Stewart. I was playing a character who had her own empire – her own TV show, magazine and cooking show. Martha was not amused. I think she threatened to sue.”
The role that changed everything
Jean’s star turn in the second season of Fargo – in which she played a Mob boss with a psychotic killer son – turned heads. For the role, however, she was made to look haggard and she suspects that was why, despite rave reviews, her phone stopped ringing for the first time ever.
“I really think a lot of it had to do with the way I looked in the show,” she muses.
“Casting directors didn’t know what to do with me after that.”
The comeback
Her dry spell was broken with a role playing Kate Winslet’s mother in Mare of Easttown and, of course, Hacks. The two shows premiered within a month of each other in 2021, and Jean will never be undervalued as a performer again.
Of her new superstar status, she says, “It’s odd because I don’t think I’m any better now than I was before.”
Tragically, her husband of 34 years, actor Richard Gilliland, died suddenly of a heart attack while Jean was filming the first season of Hacks, leaving her heartbroken and raising their adopted son Forrest, now 18, alone. They also shared son Connor, 36.
She recently began dating again and is currently linked to actor Joe Pacheco, 41, who plays Bart Daley in The Morning Show. But her priority, she says, is seeing her youngest son into adulthood, sharing, “Being a single mother is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
