NOT SO DESPERATE: Felicity Huffman
Of all the Desperate Housewives cast — the second season of which started on Channel 4 last night — Felicity Huffman has always seemed the most normal. Her character, Lynette, is a harried housewife returning to work after a career break to look after her children.
Huffman has also remained immune to the accusations of vanity and feuding levelled at her co-stars Teri Hatcher, Eva Longoria, Nicollette Sheridan and Marcia Cross.
All except Sheridan were nominated for Best Actress (TV Comedy) at this week’s Golden Globes. (None of them won.) While the show won the award for Best Comedy, it was Huffman who broke away from the pack by winning Best Movie Actress for her role as a transsexual in the low-budget movie Transamerica, a role that really did require a lack of vanity.
Huffman, 43, plays Stanley, whose sex-change counsellor won’t give the green light to the final operation to make him “Bree” (a Desperate Housewives in-joke?) until he has re-established contact with his long-lost son. Huffman is brilliant: her voice a forced monotone, her bodily movements (and functions) a jumble of masculine and feminine. The movie is subtler than a simple plea for acceptance and Huffman plays Stanley/Bree with real complexity.
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Known as “Flicka” to her family, Huffman grew up in Colorado, the youngest of eight children. She was a happy, “loud and obnoxious” child who, by 15, had secured her first television job.
While a member of David Mamet’s Atlantic Theatre Company she fell in love with actor William H. Macy, whom she finally married seven years ago. “We walk out on the red carpets and I’m basically invisible,” he says of his wife’s fame. Like Lynette’s husband in Desperate Housewives, Macy “rolls up his sleeves” to play stay-at-home dad to their two children, Sofia, 5, and Georgia, 3. Huffman says she resents being asked whether motherhood is the best experience of her life. “Because unless I say ‘It’s the best thing I’ve ever done with my whole life’, I’m considered a bad mother.”
Playing Stanley/Bree, Huffman knew “what it’s like to be in agony in your own skin”. She once suffered from bulimia, but got therapy and “worked it out” and now maintains her figure with jogging and a healthy diet. “I think I’ve always had a 40-year-old body, and now that I’m actually there I’m like, ‘Hey, pretty good, huh?’ ” And, as her surprise Golden Globe award shows, her acting isn’t bad either.