From: mueller@aludra.usc.edu (Stephen Mueller)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.northern-exp
Subject: Maggie Cover Story
Date: 27 Sep 1992 11:33:11 -0700
Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
NNTP-Posting-Host: aludra.usc.edu

	
	Here is the cover story from today's L.A. TV Times.  There is
also a second article which basically says things will steam up this season 
between Maggie and Joel.  They promise that if they do sleep together, what
happened to Moonlighting will not happen to NX.

	I hope you all enjoy this article about Maggie.  And I hope I
don't get sued for placing it here in it's entirety.

Cicely's Good Sport:

	They used to call women like Janine Turner a good sport: A woman
who can coexist equally with men, yet retain her femininity.  She's
physical but doesn't wear boots to a dance.  She's smart but doesn't
talk about Kafka while drinking longneck beer.
	Turner, in her short-cropped hairdo, seems just right as a woman
who can carve out a life around the Arctic Circle, fix a toilet, restore
a man's voice with a kiss, survive a lover's death by falling satellite
and still sparkle in the moonlight.  For the uninitiated, that's Maggie
O'Connell, Turner's character on "Northern Exposure," Emmy's newly
ordained best drama, which opens its fourth season Monday.
	Cicely, Alaska, the setting of "Exposure," isn't all there is for 
Turner.  She recently returned from locations in Rome and in the Italian Alps,
where she played opposite Sylvester Stallone in his spring, 1993
action-adventure movie "Cliffhanger."  Turner plays a mountain rescue worker
fighting a gang of murderous thieves.
	"I'm pretty athletic and adventuresome," she twangs forthrightly
in the kind of accent you get when you're raised around Ft. Worth.
"I grew up riding and running and swimming as well as dancing.  Up 
in Seattle, where we make "Northern Exposure," I've got a Palomino
quarter horse that I just ride and ride."
	Turner, 29, is an example of the benefits of perseverance.
She survived early success, famous boyfriends, later rejection and
abject poverty to become the leading light of the 90's quirkiest series.
"It's all a matter of remaining true to what you originally wanted to do,"
she says. "Just hang in there."
	As a tomboy in Texas and daughter of an airline pilot, little
Janine segued uncomfortably from beating the boys at track and basketball
to winning beauty contests (she was Miss Texas La Petite).  Dancing
class was the logical next step.  Work in amateur musical comedy led 
to modeling, then to acting, eventually to the big time.  "I was in 
New York at 15," modeling for Wilhelmina, she says.
	In L.A. at 18, she worked in a nighttime soap ("Dallas"), a
spoof of a soap ("Behind the Screen") and an actual soap
("General Hospital").  At one point she auditioned for and didn't 
win the leading lady part in Stallone's "Staying Alive."
	"I decided about that time I didn't want to be 'Hollywood'
about anything.  One thing I was sure I wouldn't do was take my top off.
I would have had to do that for 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High.'  "So I
moved to New York.  I needed more technique for acting.  I needed 
to see the plays, to read the books, to educate myself, to become an artist."
	Her move wasn't unanimously supported.  "My agents fired me. 
I went from working in national commercials to pounding the streets
hoping for regionals."  She came close to hocking the ring Alec Baldwin
had given her.  (Mikhail Baryshnikov was another New York boyfriend.)
	Her previous connections were no help two years ago when she 
was running out of money.  "I was thinking about hanging it up, and 
that's when 'Northern Exposure' happened."
	"I had eight dollars left.  I'd been working for 12 years and
that's what I had to show for it.  I was wiped out.  I knew every foot
of every pavement in New York.  I was so distraught that I said yes to
a job in a soap.  That same day I got the 'Northern Exposure' call.
They say that luck is opportunity meeting preparedness, and I believe
that's true."
	Janine Turner the cockeyed optimist turned out to be the right
casting for Maggie O'Connell.  "I get a smile on my face when I think
of her," Turner says.  "She's open for anything.  She's determined and
adventuresome.  She's more valuable than I am, and a little more neurotic."
	"All her boyfriends end up dead.  Things happen to her.  Her
mother comes by and burns her house down.  She loves animals. In fact,
she had an affair with a bear who became a man.  That was our
highest-rated show."
	"Northern Exposure" is Turner's first job for which she feels
no hidden shame.  "It's a show that people who don't watch TV watch.
Intellectually, people are refreshed.  The show is the epitome of what
I worked for since my first day in the business."
	"Maggie doesn't use her looks or sexuality to get anywhere
in life.  She gets by on her strength of personality and her intelligence. 
I read her and I went,'Yayyy! Finally! A real character!'"

(Written by Bart Mills for the L.A. TV Times, 9/27/92)


- Stephen
mueller@aludra.usc.edu


Newsgroups: alt.tv.northern-exp