Maura will be on The Ellen Degeneres Show 9/27

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Maura @ Stand Up 2 Cancer

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Parade Magazine “I was So Lucky”

For 10 seasons, Maura Tierney set the tone for compassionate caregiving with her portrayal of nurse-turned-doctor Abby Lockhart on the Emmy-winning NBC drama ER. Abby checked vitals, administered meds, soothed the sick, questioned the health-care system, and struggled repeatedly with family and addiction. The part became such a showcase for Tierney’s quiet strength as an actress that it was hard for viewers to know where Abby stopped and Tierney began. In “The Book of Abby,” which aired on Oct. 16, 2008, the character made her rounds on the squeaky floors of County General one last time. Though Tierney swears she’s got the episode at home, she has yet to watch it. When asked why, her look says it all. She’s still not ready to take on that much emotion.

Some of her reluctance may stem from what happened after she said farewell to ER. In June 2009—just as she was about to appear on a new NBC series, Parenthood—Tierney was diagnosed with breast cancer. Despite having spent hundreds of hours playing a physician, she had never been comfortable with medicine in real life.

“I was so, so scared of going to the doctor,” the 45-year-old actress admits. “I felt something, and my boyfriend at the time made me go. He said, ‘You’ve got to take care of this,’ because I was afraid. That’s one thing I will say: Don’t be afraid to go to the damn doctor. Just go!”

Which is what she’s done—a lot. Her treatment forced her to drop out of Parenthood (she was replaced by Lauren Graham), but Tierney’s now back at work on another series. Sitting in her trailer not far from where she filmed her final ER scene, she’s making her way through a tuna wrap on a break from her new show, The Whole Truth. In the ABC legal drama, premiering Sept. 22, she plays Kathryn Peale, a deputy bureau chief in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, and today she’s half in wardrobe (lawyer-lady pants and a sweater) and half not (Havaianas flip-flops with a geometric pattern). Nearby lies a book (Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad), some magazines (Harper’s, Esquire), but not much else.

‘Oddly, I wasn’t nervous about leaving ER,” Tierney says, “because that’s my baseline—nervous.” Her demeanor backs this up. Her speech is frenetic—lots of stops, starts, and repetitions, the tics of someone constantly thinking at warp speed. When she mentions that she has had trouble sleeping her entire life, you believe her. “She’s a tough Boston chick,” says Julie Bean, a TV comedy writer and Tierney’s close friend of 15 years. “They’ve got a hard veneer, but once you get inside, they have your back for the rest of your life. She’s really a love bug—total 100% ball of goo.” It takes time for Tierney’s self-deprecating wit to emerge, for her face to soften, for one to realize how petite and very beautiful she actually is.

After she left ER, Tierney traveled (Italy and Ireland were two pit stops), but she mostly got on with work. Back in 2008, while she was still on the show, she signed on to perform off-Broadway in Nicky Silver’s black comedy Three Changes, even though she admits to “crazy” stage fright. “I’d be backstage thinking, ‘Okay, if this gets really bad they’ll just take me to Bellevue [the New York hospital known for its psychiatric facilities], and they’ll be able to take care of me there.’” She also logged two seasons as a flamboyant femme foil to Denis Leary on his FX series, Rescue Me. (Her second season will be on in 2011.) And then there was the unexpected stop in between.

Yet her breast-cancer diagnosis was not a “Why me?” moment. “I was so lucky,” Tierney says. “I had insurance, I found a great team of doctors at UCLA, and I could afford not to work while I was getting treated. From the beginning my doctor told me, ‘You’re going to be okay,’ and I chose to believe him. So there was always that in my head.”

After she underwent surgery in the summer of 2009, the final pathology report threw Tierney another curve. “It turned out to be a more aggressive kind of cancer than they thought,” she explains. Only a decade earlier, her doctor told her, pathologists wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. “He said they would have patted me on the head and told me, ‘You’re cured,’ and I would have died of breast cancer.” Fortunately, 10 years of research and new medications came to her aid.

What her friends recall about Tierney’s bout with cancer was her strength. “She was just, ‘All right, this is what I’ve got to do, and I’m going to do it,’” Julie Bean says. “She was really stoic and really took care of it herself. It was so impressive—especially when you live in an actress’s world. Most people have all these other people taking care of stuff, and she has never been that type of person.”

While she was going through chemotherapy, her father, Joseph, was also suffering from cancer—in fact, dying from it. “I think she really didn’t want to talk about her sickness with her dad,” Bean says. “It’s that Irish Catholic in both of them: quietly feeling bad for the other person when you’re going through your own hell, not talking about it, just keeping it in. It must have been the hardest time of her life—but she still maintained her core and her sense of humor. And God bless her, she had to go bald to her dad’s funeral.”

After her father died last December, she dove into North Atlantic, a challenging and physically strenuous production with the avant-garde Wooster Group in New York City. Still, the cancer arc is something she has not yet fully processed. “I’ve been misquoted a lot, and there’s this tendency for people to put on to you how they think you should be or what they think you should feel,” Tierney says. “The truth is, I had my surgery, and I have two more months on this one drug. I haven’t figured out where I want to focus my energies to help others, and I don’t know what kind of wisdom to drop on anybody yet—except for, you know, they can help people now.” She pauses after this statement and takes a deep breath. “I feel an immense sense of gratitude, but sometimes I think there should be room for more gratitude [in me], because I can still be bitchy in the morning…”

She laughs at her own self-appraisal. And it’s that sense of empathy with an edge that seeps into most of the people she plays. “Even though my new show isn’t a comedy, I see the humor in my character,” she says of the prosecutor she plays on The Whole Truth. “There’s something funny about her tunnel vision. At work, she sees things as very black and white. I don’t have that kind of clarity. I’m here… I’m there…”

A moment later, as if to disprove her point, Tierney offers some hard-won wisdom. “There is one thing I’ve learned for sure. It’s a life-changing thing to be in a position of needing help and being so lucky as to get it. And to feel like that’s okay,” she says. “You can’t just take care of everybody else all the time. That’s almost as perspective-changing as the illness. For someone like me, that was kind of tough.”

As her friend Julie Bean notes: “There is a tendency to close yourself off when you’re in that situation, especially about something so incredibly private. She understood that we needed to be there for her, in a way. After her surgery, her place was like an open house—friends coming through all the time. She just allowed it.”

While Tierney continues to take in the events of this past year, there’s plenty that makes her happy. Asking her about the things she likes to do results in a long list: reading (“I love Martin Amis. Try The Information—that’s the one”); listening to music (Joanna Newsom, Dum Dum Girls, and LCD Soundsystem are in heavy rotation on her iPhone); running and riding her bike along the beach; tuning into NPR’s This American Life and Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! She has also started cooking.

“I wish I had a little more joy of cooking—because mostly I have anxiety of cooking,” Tierney says. “I’m so proud when things come out well. Last week I made some nice sole fillets wrapped in spinach with pine nuts.”

The chef thing will come in handy when the whole Tierney clan flies in from Boston for Thanksgiving this year. The current count is 10, but she’s hoping for more aunts, uncles, and cousins. “We always go back East for the holidays—always, always. But everybody’s excited. This will be something new and different.”

It may still be a while before Tierney is able to watch “The Book of Abby,” or feel like she’s into the next chapter of her life, but she’s getting there. It’s a lot to take in—even for a tough, Red Sox–loving Boston chick. In the meantime, she’s happy to stop talking and get back to work.
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The Things She Loves
Flea-market finds and odd gifts from some of her co-stars fill Tierney’s much-beloved Venice Beach house. “Did she mention the stuffed squirrels in a glass case that Andy Dick gave her?” her friend Julie Bean asks with a laugh. “It hangs in the powder room.” She didn’t, but here are a few things Tierney does love having around her place:

• A painting of “a really calm woman,” by Heather Barron. “She’s got this crown of thorns, so there’s sort of a Catholic thing that’s brought in there,” Tierney half-jokes, “and I just find it very beautiful. I’m always proud I picked it.” A fan of Barron’s work, Tierney gave one of her paintings to Julie Bean for her birthday.

• A white ceramic fish. “It has marbles all in it,” Tierney says of one favorite acquisition. “And it lights up.”

• Her bedroom window seat overlooking the canals. “I really like it. It’s a very comfortable place to be—a calm spot.”

• A photo of herself caught by a DMV camera. “I framed it!” Tierney says. “I am so clearly running the red light. I don’t have a care in the world—it’s hilarious.”

http://www.parade.com/celebrity/2010/09/the-return-of-maura-tierney.html

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Maura to present at Emmys

Maura will be presenting at the 2010 Emmy awards on Sun 29 August.

http://www.tvguide.com/news/fillion-deschanel-emmys-1022206.aspx

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Stand Up 2 Cancer, televised event

Maura will be appearing alongside other celebrities, athletes, cancer survivors for televised event “Stand Up 2 Cancer” on Sept 10.

http://www.standup2cancer.org/node/4163

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