The Ivey League : Actress of stage and film becomes a ‘Designing’ woman

“I don’t want to get too excited about this,” says Judith Ivey, just as if she hadn’t landed the biggest plum possible for an actress in TV.

This season, Ivey will play B.J. Poteet, a wealthy Texas widow who relocates to Atlanta in “Designing Women,” the show producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason laughingly calls “the biggest, baddest women’s show in TV history.”

“Designing Women,” which begins its seventh season Friday, is the Rolls-Royce of TV series for actresses: sensational ratings, good scripts, instant recognition.

There’s also some risk. Bloodworth-Thomason says, “We’re making a switch despite our biggest ratings ever. And we’re doing it because we have the perfect actress for the role. It’s entirely a creative decision.”

Anyhow, Ivey’s not too excited about all of this.

“It’s always a good idea in this business not to lose your head over something,” she says. “You don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow, so it’s a good idea to maintain perspective. New York cab drivers can help you do that.”

A few years ago Ivey was starring on Broadway in “Blithe Spirit” with Richard Chamberlain and Geraldine Page. “I was exactly where I wanted to be,” she recalls, “doing something I’d always wanted to do. I hopped in a cab to go home and the driver said, ‘So how’d you like the show?’ He turned around, stared at me and said, ‘No, you’re not.’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ He looked at a poster near the theater entrance, then back at me and said, ‘Which one are you?’ I pointed to me. He insisted, ‘That’s not you!’ I was starting to get agitated. I said, ‘Yes, it is. I’ve got a wig on.’

“He was still suspicious. He said, ‘What else you done? Any movie?’ I rattled off a lot of movies. I swear, he’d seen every one of them. And when I finished he just shook his head and said, ‘I don’t remember you in any of them.’ ”

The critics have better memories. One called her “The Thinking Man’s Meryl Streep.”

John Simon, the most notoriously acerbic theater critic in New York, wrote of her performance in David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly”: “Ivey is so phenomenal that she can play table tennis with your heart at both ends of the table simultaneously.”

Ivey has won two Tonys, for “Steaming” and “Hurlyburly,” and this year was nominated for a third for “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard.” Jason Robards, her co-star, says, “I honestly don’t know if I’d have done the play without her.” Close friend and “Steaming” co-star Margaret Whitton says, “She’s in a league of her own, the Ivey league.”

The Ivey league consists of Judith, her husband Tim Braine, an independent producer (his “Comrades of Summer” with Joe Mantegna recently aired on HBO), and daughter Margaret Elizabeth, 2; home base, after years of nomadic existence, is Los Angeles.

“I still say Texas when people ask me where I’m from,” she says, “though the truth is that I haven’t lived there since I was a kid and that I actually lived longer in New York. But Texas stays with you a little longer. Whenever I think I might be losing the accent I find that with a couple of seconds of conversation it clicks right back in again.”

Ivey’s uncanny gift for dialects and accents is the result of years of on-the-scene observation. When they left Texas, her family moved to Michigan. “I became the quintessential Midwesterner,” Ivey. says “I had all the different shades of accent down perfectly.” She went to Illinois State and later found work at the Evanston Theater Company and the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where a colleague told her, “You’ll never be able to do Shakespeare or contemporary British theater till you lose that Midwestern twang.” Several years later she was doing a cockney in “Steaming” and at the Tony ceremony a host thanked her “for flying in from London.”

The transition from the Goodman to Broadway was not life in an Ivey cottage. In Chicago she supported herself with commercials.

“Once, at the Goodman, they shortened the intermission so I could get to a commercial shoot on time. I finished playing Juliet, jumped in my car and drove like a banshee to this restaurant, then scrambled into a waitress outfit to sell lobster.” She “hit the wall” on commercials while filming for static-free Cling. “The director said to me, ‘Can you make it tomorrow?’ I just didn’t feel warm about socks, even when washed in static-free Cling.”

Even after appearing on Broadway in “Bedroom Farce” and “Piaf,” she considered quitting show business to open a pet shop. At a party a friend said, “Gosh, things must be going great for you. The casting director I know says you’re the hottest young actor in New York.” The hottest young actor in New York had just signed up for unemployment.

Despite the dedication and years of experience, she still needed a “break.” Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward saw her in “Steaming” and gave her the lead in the feature film “Harry and Son,” and Steve Martin, seeing the same production, cast her in “The Lonely Guy.”

Despite her film work, she shows none of the snobbery toward TV shared by many of her stage veteran friends.

“I like TV,” she says emphatically. “I’m concentrated and I like it when someone likes what I’ve done in one take. I don’t know what to do after five or six takes. If I get it right the first or second time, I like to move on.” She likes the life, too: “It’s a regular job. It’s the closest life you can have as an actor to the way most working people live.”

She also likes working with her producer. Bloodworth-Thomason helped her get a bead on her character, who is modeled in large part on the governor of Texas. “Judy and I talked it through,” Bloodworth-Thomason says, “and we decided Judy’s role should be a lot like you would imagine a young Ann Richards to be--you think of her as having a cocktail in her hand, air in her hair, melody in her voice and a hip cocked while she’s beguiling people at a party with her favorite bawdy story.”

The only thing Ivey isn’t sure that she’s going to like is “being recognized in supermarkets. I’ve always been the actress whose voice everyone remembered but whose face they couldn’t place.” “Designing Women” should make her face familiar enough for even a New York cab driver.

Starting this week “Designing Women” airs Fridays at 9 p.m. on CBS.