People don't really know Julianna Margulies as Julianna Margulies. They know her as Nurse Hathaway in ER; as the woman who opened the first-ever episode with her attempted suicide; or, almost as often, as The Woman Who Has Kissed George Clooney. But Margulies's low public profile, despite the fact that she is the only ER actor to have won an Emmy, has ensured the woman behind the role has been hidden.
This might not be something the corkscrew-haired Margulies can count on for long. She has just appeared on the front cover of the US edition of Esquire. The new series of ER, all blood 'n' guts 'n' emotions, looks set to be the biggest yet: the much-trailed live episode (shown on Sky 1 on Thursday night), attracted nearly 43 million viewers when shown in the States, the most for any episode of a drama series in TV history. And Margulies is set to appear in some big films coming soon: The Newton Boys, with Matthew McConaughey; Traveller, with Bill Paxton; and, in December, Paradise Road, with Glenn Close.
So there doesn't appear to be much chance of Margulies getting typecast as Nurse Hathaway. "Well, it could happen," she says, "but the great thing about Hathaway is that she's not a stereotyped character. You mostly see her in her scrubs, she is very down-toearth, there's no obvious ethnicity about her, so you can't categorise her."
Indeed, it's this everywoman quality that makes Hathaway such a popular character, especially for female ER viewers. She is not ditsy; she is not the cliche of the ever-helpful woman nurse; she takes her misery on the chin. Her appearance is a kind of scrubbedup, non-pneumatic beauty to which women can relate. ("I do get my fair share of `I'm going to marry you when I get out of prison'," Margulies says. "But mostly male fans tend to be scared of me. I'm not your typical oohbaby baby.") As Hathaway, she has a kind of emotional reality, which is very contemporary: she is tough, but she also cries in the toilets.
"I see Hathaway as a multi-layered person," Margulies says. "It's like a constant peeling of layers; sometimes it's really raw and painful, sometimes it's sweet and easy." She also has to deal with the particular baggage that goes with being a nurse. "Nurses work so hard and it's not just the physical, it's the emotional. That's what I find so fascinating about Hathaway. Where do you put this emotion when you're done at the end of the day?"
Hathaway has had some brilliant storylines: the suicide attempt, the relationship with Dr Ross, the affair with paramedic Shep, the brilliant "drugstore armed robbery" episode with Ewan McGregor, her dealings with management as head of the nurses - but these are stories for which Margulies has had to fight.
"The writers gave me such amazing stuff in the first season, then in the second I became such a reactionary character - I was just reacting to other people's characters and nothing was happening to Hathaway. I saw an episode in the second series and I couldn't believe how bad I was, because I was so bored with the material. And I vowed I would never let that happen again - for the viewers, if not just for my selfrespect." So she went to the writers and told them she'd leave unless they gave her more to do. "This is a woman who had taken an overdose - didn't they want to explore why? I said: `I can't put sutures on and put in an IV and make it exciting if you're not going to give me something else.' The writers' response was totally respectful and we really thrashed it out."
Nevertheless, Margulies showed considerable self-possession to fight in such a way - a strength she credits to her upbringing. She attended the mega-creative Steiner schools, shuttling between New York, Paris and London, because her parents split up when she was a year old. "It was a very eclectic childhood," she says.
"My mom was a bohemian, a bit of a gypsy, a very free spirit. And my dad, who worked in advertising (he wrote the famous US Alker Seltzer ad: `Pop, pop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is'), is not like that at all. So I'd go from staying with Mom and her hippy boyfriends, travelling round Europe in a VW camper bus, to staying with Dad in a fancy hotel like a princess. With Mom I'd be in ripped tights with little things in my hair; with Dad I'd be in Laura Ashley. I think that gave me a lot . . . When I was starting out, I knew how to waitress, but man, I knew how to eat in a good restaurant too!"
So, which is Margulies now? "Both. I'm just the same as I was then. Why do people always think that fame should change you? I mean, I burp." She laughs. "Seriously, I was at a dinner party and this woman said to me, I can't believe you still burp! And I'm like, oh, sure, I'm on a TV show, so I don't burp any more."
The trouble is, though, that as Margulies gets more famous, people are going to want to know about her habits - and not just that she is 30, smokes Marlboro Lights and adores Ken Loach. Margulies is obsessive about her privacy. When I ask about her boyfriend - Ron Eldard, star of the American version of Men Be- having Badly, who played Hathaway's ex, Shep, in ER - she says: "I'm not going to talk about it. Sorry." She is genuinely apologetic. "It's not personal to you. But it's the one thing I have that's mine. And I want viewers to believe in whatever character I'm playing, I don't want them to know what's really going on in my life."
She extends this privacy to other actors, too: when she says that Alex Kingston is going to have a role in the new series of ER, and I tell her that Kingston used to be married to Ralph Fiennes, her eyes go glassy and she looks bored. "Really? I don't know and, to be honest, I'm not very interested. I try to respect other actors' right to their privacy, which is why I don't read magazines like People and I don't want people to tell me things. I don't want to know!"
I wonder what she thinks, then, of her colleague George Clooney, who as Batman has achieved the kind of fame that renders normal privacy impossible. "To me, George hasn't changed a bit," she says. "He's still like the big brother I never had. But I wouldn't want his fame: his face is on cereal boxes, he has helicopters circling his house. I couldn't live a life where you can't go to the supermarket, you can't ride the subway." It could happen, I say. "Well, sometimes it does. I was in San Antonio, Texas this summer doing a film and I couldn't leave my hotel room. It was tourists who were really freaking out and I couldn't handle it at all."
So she doesn't want a stratospheric career like Clooney's? "I'm more interested in taking it over the long-term rather than cashing in on it now - which is not what George is doing, it's what's happened to him. I think he'll have a very long career because he's a) beautiful and b) a great actor. For me, I'm very cautious and need to be creating something that has longevity." This is exactly the kind of thing you'd expect Julianna Margulies to say: grown-up, self-possessed, very much her own woman. Hathaway, for sure, is lucky to have her.
SKY 1 screens ER on Thursday nights at 10 p.m. RTE will be showing the new series from Monday, November 3rd at 9.30 p.m. Channel 4 is still screening the previous series, at 10 p.m. on Saturdays