E-mail a friendHolland Taylor
airdate November 10, 2008
Holland Taylor is a versatile veteran of film and TV. Her breakthrough role came in the sitcom Bosom Buddies, which led to film and other TV offers on a steady basis. She won an Emmy for her work in The Practice and has been on the big screen in such features as Romancing the Stone, Spy Kids 2 and 3-D and Legally Blonde. She also played Nancy Reagan in the made-for-TV movie The Day Reagan Was Shot. Taylor majored in drama at Bennington College and has a masters degree in spiritual psychology.
Actress offers advice on overcoming rejection at auditions. (3:29)
Full interview. (9:39)
Holland Taylor
Tavis Smiley: Holland Taylor is a terrific actress whose career includes six Emmy nominations and an Emmy, winning for her role on "The Practice." She continues her role now in television's highest-rated comedy, "Two and a Half Men." The show airs, of course, Monday nights at 9:00 p.m., as if you didn't know. Here now a scene from "Two and a Half Men."
[Clip]
Tavis: Such a smart aleck, so overbearing.
Holland Taylor: (Unintelligible) I'm perfectly delightful. (Laughter.) It's actually very hard to play this part, because sometimes I open the script and I say, "I can't -- nobody behaves like this." And Chuck assures me that yes, many people do.
Tavis: Yes, they do. (Laughter.)
Taylor: And so now, after all these years, I've had so many people say "You're just like my mother" or "You're just like my Aunt Sally," and I realize, well, I've got to 'fess up. I've got to just do it.
Tavis: So it's safe to assume that Holland Taylor is nothing like that.
Taylor: No, to tell you the truth, I'm really not. And sometimes, I find it very hard to do. But as Chuck told me, he said, "The more forcefully you do it, the funnier it is." So I'm bad. (Laughter.) I'm definitely very bad.
Tavis: As I look at your corpus, look at your history of work, there is something about you and these strong women characters --
Taylor: It's a mystery.
Tavis: Was that by design, or did it just kind of happen that way?
Taylor: No, no. It's so funny when people say, "You've had such a fascinating career, the choices that you've made." The choices that I've made have mostly been to take every job that I've been given. (Laughter.) Those are my --
Tavis: Those are your choices, huh?
Taylor: Those are my clever choices. And I don't know why I've played a lot of strong women, because I myself am not really that forceful, and certainly in my earlier years in show business I was quite timid and quite beaten down, and didn't get millions of jobs that I was up for and failed at many, many auditions and often went through long periods of depression. It's just been just horribly difficult. (Laughter.)
And so I don't know why I get cast as these aggressive, successful, take-no-prisoners women, but I'm beginning to like it.
Tavis: When you look back on it -- and maybe you haven't, so I'm going to ask you to do it now; maybe you have. When you look back on the process early on of being, to your point now, rejected, of failing at so many of those auditions, do you see anything now, as you look back on that, that helps you understand better why that happened?
I ask that because I've said many times, you have to have a strong constitution to be an actor.
Taylor: Why -- what -- why you didn't get the part?
Tavis: Yeah, you, yeah.
Taylor: I've discovered, actually, a great deal about it, in retrospect.
Tavis: I'm glad I asked.
Taylor: First of all, I have had any number of instances where I've met people in later years -- 10 years later after an audition or something when they said, "That was the most brilliant audition I ever say for such-and-such," and I hadn't gotten the job. And I had been crushed by not getting it, and I had suffered over it and often remembered it and my face would get hot with embarrassment.
And then I would find out that I had actually done superbly, even, but that there were many other reasons why people get or don't get jobs -- I'm sure you know this too. And after a while, I really understood this and I understood that it was very rarely me getting the job, and I say to young actors, "Don't go into an audition saying, 'I've got to get that job, I'm going to get that job,' because it isn't up to you."
And if you don't get it, then of course you feel that you have failed, that you have crapped out, that you did badly. And the fact is that the only thing -- it's like running a race. I say to students, "Can you win a race?" I'll say to a young, athletic man, and he'll say, "Yes, I can." And I said, "Well, what if someone's faster than you?" And he said, "Well, then I'll just have to run faster?"
I said, "But what if someone runs faster than you?" And then I said, "Then you won't win that race, right?" And he said, "I guess not." And I said, "So you aren't in charge of winning. You're in charge of running."
Tavis: I like that.
Taylor: And that is the verb -- you're running. That's your ballgame, that's what you're doing. Winning is a description of something that happens.
Tavis: And who knew that she was a philosopher too?
Taylor: Well, I'm old. (Laughter.) No, but you see what I'm saying?
Tavis: No, I totally get it. I want to quote you on that.
Taylor: And when I learned that, it freed me tremendously. And sometimes I'm at an audition, and I say "Gee, this is going south." And I know that it's not really me, it's just a confluence of things -- it's just not going to work out. And I don't take it personally.
Tavis: I'm glad you said that. What I took from your wonderful dissertation on that was that you can't take this stuff personally.
Taylor: No, no. In fact, I got a great piece of advice about that, too, from Norman Lear. I know you ask about advice, don't you?
Tavis: All the time.
Taylor: I was doing a show for Norman Lear called "The Powers That Be," which was a political sitcom that was just way ahead of its time. It was for NBC, as I recall, and they really didn't know what they had. And it was really brilliant. It was a brilliant ensemble -- Peter McNichol was on it, David Hyde Pierce, Elizabeth Barrage, John Forsythe, Eve Gordon, Robin Bartlett.
And it was so witty and brilliant, and it was canceled very quickly. And Norman Lear found out about this by reading it in the newspaper, and Norman Lear is one of the most important men --
Tavis: He's iconic.
Taylor: One of the great geniuses of our industry, and personally a huge man -- this man owns a copy of the Bill of Rights, which he paid $1 million for, and he travels it to schools. This is the kind of man he is.
Anyway, so he reads about his show being canceled in the paper, and I was in his office and I was swimming around and swiveling and fulminating and carrying on and frothing at the mouth, and he came over to me and cupped my cheek in his hand, and he said, "Holland, Holland -- what kind of schmuck would I have to be to take it personally?"
And from that moment on, I don't think I've taken anything in show business personally, because it ain't personal.
Tavis: It ain't personal, yeah.
Taylor: It's never personal.
Tavis: Let me get personal, if I can.
Taylor: Okay.
Tavis: That name, Holland.
Taylor: Yeah, it's a family name.
Tavis: Tell me about it, yeah.
Taylor: Family name. And my nickname when I was a kid was Penny, and I wanted to go to my real name at a certain point. So when I went away to high school, I changed it to -- I just said "No more nickname." And my hair was much redder when I was a kid, and so that was my nickname, Penny.
Tavis: I'm curious about why you wanted to move to Holland. I ask that because as a kid -- I think I've said this once before on the TV show, probably -- I used to hate my name as a kid. One, then and still now --
Taylor: It's because it's unusual.
Tavis: Well, I get called Travis more often than Tavis, so Tavis never seemed to work anyway.
Taylor: Yeah, right, Travis County, Texas, right.
Tavis: Yeah, exactly, you see what I mean? (Laughter.) Travis all the time -- people couldn't get it right. And I just thought it was so weird and so different, and I just wanted to be, like -- I was a big Michael Jackson, Jackson Five fan. I said, "Mom, why couldn't you just name me Michael, something simple and cool?"
Taylor: Well, as kids we want to be regular.
Tavis: Exactly. But as I got older and particularly moved into the radio and TV business, Tavis Smiley is a uniquely different kind of name.
Taylor: Yes. It's nice to be --
Tavis: But I didn't like it as a kid. So I'm interested -- so Holland is --
Taylor: I understand -- well, I guess I was ready to not be just one of the group, and in fact, everyone --
Tavis: There are tons of Pennys.
Taylor: Yeah, exactly. And every once in a blue moon, and I do mean a blue moon -- a rare blue moon -- somebody will be so insane as to call me Holly. And I think, are you talking to me? (Laughter.) It's like -- why would you change my unusual name to something that is not unusual. Call me anything else -- you can call me anything else -- but not just a diminutive of my name.
Tavis: Yeah, that's funny. Can I just tell you, since you're here, how much I loved "Romancing the Stone?"
Taylor: Oh, great, that was --
Tavis: That movie's on every night somewhere.
Taylor: That was -- (laughter) it is.
Tavis: I love that movie.
Taylor: And I'm on every night somewhere.
Tavis: Yes, you are.
Taylor: Well, that movie -- I guess that was my first real movie movie, and it was wonderful. Yeah, Bob Zemeckis directed it and let me ad lib, and if I ad-libbed something clever he'd say "Great, keep that in." Directors are so flattering when they do that.
It was great -- and Kathleen Turner. And she and I became very good friends, because that was before she was a star. And so we became, and we are friends to this day.
Tavis: Comedy -- is that your thing? Is that --
Taylor: No. No, not at all, no. I was a stage actress pretty exclusively until I did "Bosom Buddies," and then I started going back and forth. I actually prefer the theater. I like the life. I like the life of the theater.
Tavis: By the life of the theater, you mean what?
Taylor: I mean the lifestyle of the -- and I like the fact that the performance is in one big arc of energy.
Tavis: You like the live thing?
Taylor: I like the live thing very much, and also, I'm in charge so I -- nobody messes with my timing and nobody says, "I think I'll put a scissor right in that --" I'm in charge of my performance, and it's also a wonderful arc where it's like an athletic effort, where you feel an enormous sense of relief and accomplishment when it's done, and I love that.
And I also love the material that's in the theater. It's often very wonderful literature and stuff. But we don't get to do that much on television.
Tavis: I guess if you're going to be on TV, it doesn't hurt to be on the number one comedy.
Taylor: No, no, it's brilliant to be -- (laughter) it was very smart of me. That was one of my really --
Tavis: Great choices.
Taylor: That was one of my very, very great choices. (Laughter.)
Tavis: I saw that coming, yeah.
Taylor: To decide being on the very number one comedy on television, that was a good choice, and to have as sons Charlie Sheen and Jon Cryer.
Tavis: Not a bad cast.
Taylor: And Angus T. as my grandson, that was also a very brilliant choice on my part. Of course, I cast the show, as you know. (Laughter.)
Tavis: Holland Taylor, and don't you dare call her Holly -- Holland Taylor, "Two and a Half Men." Nice to have you on the program.
Taylor: It was wonderful.
Tavis: Come back and see us again sometime.
Taylor: Just great. I would love to. I would love to talk about this new world.
Tavis: I would love to do that.
Taylor: We are in a new world, and I feel it every breath I take.
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