“Would Elton John wear this?” was the rule Christine Baranski used when dressing for the part of an ailing heiress in the second season of Hulu’s viciously melodramatic Nine Perfect Strangers. From the moment Victoria steps out of her limousine at the isolated Alpine wellness retreat (where an ensemble of wealthy elites will be “treated” for trauma with psychedelic ’shrooms by Nicole Kidman’s chillingly manipulative “therapist” Masha Dmitrichenko), she commands every room she enters.
“From the fur boots and hat, to the scarves, earrings and the handsome young lover on her arm, Victoria is a woman committed to living – and dying -– in grand style,” grins the 73-year-old. “Even her walking canes are designer, topped with expensive accoutrements. I think it’s a defence against dying, the way these women – perhaps myself included – seek to defy age.”
With her regal bearing and sophisticated wit, often tempered with a twinkle of camp, Baranski is fast becoming America’s answer to the late, great Dame Maggie Smith – a five o’clock martini of a woman with a high-kick and a twist. And while she demurs that “that would be the HIGHEST compliment”, she admits that, like Smith, she’s made her name playing “a long line of women with great strength and authority” – and often a truckload of money.
Baranski achieved mainstream recognition in the late 90s as fabulously wealthy, caustic-tongued cougar Maryann Thorpe in Chuck Lorre’s sitcom Cybil, before dominating a series of glass-walled corporate meeting rooms as formidable Diane Lockhart in CBS legal dramas The Good Wife (2009-2016) and its spin-off The Good Fight (2017-22). Since then she’s been seen deploying her withering snobbery as 19th-century matriarch Agnes van Rhijn in Julian Fellowes’ period drama The Gilded Age. She’s probably most-memed, though, strutting her stuff as one of the three Dynamos, alongside Meryl Streep and Julie Walters, in jukebox musical movie Mamma Mia! (2008).
But if you assumed – like me – that Baranski was raised with the kind of privilege her characters like to flex, then you’d be dead wrong. Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1952, she’s the daughter of second-generation Polish immigrants Virginia and Lucien Baranski, who edited a Polish-language newspaper. Lucien’s sudden death – when his daughter was just eight years old – “changed my life, my older brother’s life, my mother’s life, very dramatically, overnight”, she says.
Talking via video call with refreshing candour for a Hollywood star on a publicity treadmill, she tells me that “I don’t want to call what happened a ‘tragedy’ because that sounds heavy handed. But before my father died, we were living in a nice area, in the home of my grandmother, who I dearly loved.”
She recalls the day she came home from school to learn her father had been taken to hospital. “That was very disturbing but I didn’t think too much of it. Then I woke up to the sound of wailing and crying in the living room. My mother came in to tell me that my father had died of an aortic aneurism.”
The small family moved out of their comfortable home to a rougher area, and Baranski had to move schools. “It was quite traumatic for me,” she recalls. “I suffered a lot of anxiety about losing my mother. Anxiety about money – would my mother be able to support us? She was terminally grouchy because she had to go to work ordering parts at an air conditioning factory – you can imagine how much fun that was.”
Baranski says that her mother never once comforted her through those years. “I have no memory of her ever saying: ‘It’s going to be alright,’ or ‘It’s OK to cry.’ No. She was not…” Baranski shrugs off the sadness with a brisk toss of her honey-blonde bob. “She was raised during the Depression, so she was a tough cookie.” If that wasn’t hard enough, Baranski was educated at an all-girls Catholic school by “strict, often mean” nuns.
But she believes that “for better or worse, hardship, sadness, loss can develop character”. In her case, tackling adversity yielded “a kind of inner strength. An ability to cope”. By the time she graduated from high school (as class president and Salutarian, of course) and began training at the prestigious Juilliard drama school, she had amassed “a lot of survival skills”. These included a rigorous work ethic and an ability to really appreciate life in the moment. “I’m a very sensuous person,” she says. “I enjoy life.”
Lately she concedes, the “toxic cycle of breaking news in America, which can be truly disturbing”, had begun to rattle her. So, like the characters in Nine Perfect Strangers, she took a little mini-break to Jamaica to “get away from my phone and the fresh hell it brought on the hour”.
Did she try any weird therapy, like the people on the show? “I don’t go for kooky stuff,” she says. But she was delighted to find her resort employed “the most magnificent masseuse with the strongest most magical hands that I have ever… Oh! Every day he would get the knots out of my body.”
On a more spiritual level, she’s been taking online poetry courses and becomes evangelical about the healing powers of verse. “Poetry requires the kind of concentration that is a 180 from the faster, more superficial kind of focus we use to get through the day,” she says. “If you study a poem you have to take the time to really sink into every sound, word and idea.” Having found courses on Dante and Wordsworth “really healing on a mental and spiritual level”, she’s now reading 17th-century French poet Baudelaire and relishes the way he “really draws you into the sensual world”.
Back in his day, you could have said he risked being “cancelled” for the moral offense caused by his more debauched lines. These days, he stands charged of potential misogyny. One of the characters in Nine Perfect Strangers is a disgraced former children’s TV host who’s been “cancelled” for bawling out his film crew. Baranski’s Victoria is on the brink of being “cancelled” by her adult daughter (played by Schitt’s Creek’s Annie Murphy). Victoria lists her maternal “crimes” for the amusement of another guest. “Let’s see: I’m neglectful but I’m also smothering. I don’t support her but I also never forced her to stand on her own two feet so she has no self esteem. Other than that, I’m a monster.”
Baranski thinks cancel culture has “had its day” in the US. “It’s not a phrase I am hearing often now,” she says. “It’s mean spirited. Nobody likes it. It makes everybody uncomfortable. Anything that comes into the culture predicated on meanness and vengeance and retribution is not sustainable. Just look at our politics!”
Would she ever experiment with drugs, like the characters in the show? “I’m not brave enough,” she says. “I’ve never done LSD and I’m not really a pot smoker. Altering my consciousness never held any great allure for me. I love to share a good bottle of bordeaux, but that’s not the same thing…” she laughs.
“Because my character Diane Lockhart was resorting to psilocybin, I did try a tiny little bit of that on my dock with my best friend and my daughter,” she confides. “I don’t know if it had any real effect on me. We were singing Beatles songs rather loudly. But I could do that without drugs. Diane also took ketamine but I was warned against trying that.”
I tell Baranski I share her fear of messing with my mind, but that I might reconsider if I found myself in chronic or terminal pain. “Oh yes,” she nods. She tells me her late husband, Matthew Cowles (who died in 2014 aged 69) “smoked quite a bit of pot” to ease the symptoms of his type one diabetes. “I took issue with that at the time,” she says. “Now that he’s gone I regret giving him such a hard time, because I think it was his way of managing… not just the pain but the discomfort of that particular condition. Your blood sugar levels are not stable – if they’re not going up they’re going down. It’s a really difficult thing to suffer from your whole life. I think the pot helped him through.”
Thanks to decades of yoga and pilates, Baranski’s still physically fit in her seventies. She tells me that, as a longtime opera lover, she recently stood throughout a four-hour performance (by Anna Netrebko in Saltzburg) because there were no seated tickets available. But should her health decline, leaving her in serious discomfort, she would certainly consider trying pot or more psilocybin. “Down the road, if I need any of that to help me through then I’d much rather that than tonnes of pharmaceuticals or being hooked up to machines.”
She smiles. “Let me just float out,” she says. “Luxe, calme et volupte, as Baudelaire would say.”
Series two of ‘Nine Perfect Strangers’ begins on Prime Video on Thursday, with new episodes released weekly