It’s the Second Time Around for ‘Mrs. Cosby’

Phylicia Rashad remembers a meeting with Brandon Tartikoff shortly after “The Cosby Show” had ended and the former NBC programmer was newly installed at Paramount Pictures. The actress, who had played Claire Huxtable for eight years on the ‘80s’ most successful comedy series, mentioned to Tartikoff that she was getting new offers to play on series, none of which excited her.

“I complained to him about the quality of television at that time,” she recalls, “and he said, ‘It’s going to get worse before it gets better.’ He also said, ‘You want my advice? Don’t do these. Give your audience a chance to miss you.’ ”

And so she did for the next four years, making occasional television appearances, a few films and mostly taking to the stage (“Jelly’s Last Jam,” “Blues for an Alabama Sky”).

In fact, she was smack in the middle of a theatrical commitment in Atlanta last year when Bill Cosby called and proposed that she become his television wife for a second time. Another actress had been hired--and fired--as Ruth Lucas for the pilot of “Cosby,” and now Rashad was asked to fly to Los Angeles and tape the show in two days.

“It was an absolute surprise,” says Rashad, 49, relaxing in her dressing room between rehearsals at the studio in Queens where the series moved after the first three episodes were shot. “But it was Bill asking and it’s fun to ride with Bill.”

Soon she was commuting daily between New York during the day, and Washington, D.C., for nightly performances of the play she had started in Atlanta.

“I learned that the capacity for work is tremendous,” she says with a laugh. “However, the needs of the human body must be respected. My body almost broke down because your digestion can’t function when you’re constantly moving around like I was.”

*

Now “Cosby” is well into season two and Rashad continues to try to find the nuances in a role that could be seen as the least colorful of the cast. “Ruth is absolutely comfortable with her husband, knows him so very well, and yet there can be the fear of a great surprise,” she says. “Which is true in life. People make a mistake when they think there’s not always the chance of something new in someone you know well.”

Rashad’s form of subtle wit blends seamlessly by now with Cosby’s. “They’re almost symbiotic at this point,” says one of the show’s executive producers, Norman Steinberg. “They have an unspoken language between them and she brings a comfort level to the show and to Bill which is incalculable.”

Dressed in brown velour slacks and sweater, Rashad is as serene and seemingly together as she appears on screen. (“Anxiety and drive do not enter into what I do.”) Despite two Emmy nominations, she received no offers for sitcoms of her own following “The Cosby Show”--but there is no rancor. The black “Mary Tyler Moore Show” never seemed to enter network thinking, and that’s fine by her.

“Maybe I’m just not thinking right!” she exclaims. “I don’t know why I wasn’t offered a show of my own and I’m not worried about it.”

She dismisses the notion that racism may have played a part: “I can’t proceed as a human being and I certainly can’t proceed as an artist if I focus on racism,” she says. “I learned that from my mother early on, who did everything to keep her young children from being permanently scarred. From her I learned that the spirit is much bigger than man-made law.”

*

Phylicia and her three siblings grew up in Houston, where their mother preferred to tell them, “It’s a private club and we’re not members,” when they wondered why they weren’t allowed in certain theaters or amusement parks. Her parents divorced when she was 6 but there was always a full, friendly and learned family around.

“Our parents had the good sense to allow us to love them both,” Rashad says. “What I learned from my parents and their brothers and sisters was the joy of working [her father was a dentist, her mother an accomplished pianist] and the value of education.” (She graduated from Howard University.)

Without parental prodding, Phylicia and her sister (Debbie Allen--choreographer, dancer, producer, director) knew early on they were headed for the world of song and dance and acting. Theirs was a typical sister relationship: “I thought she was a pest but I’ve come to understand she looked up to me,” Rashad says, laughing, and the relationship remains close.

“Now she’s very aggressive and doesn’t give a hoot what I think!”

Allen appears as a not-so-revered sister-in-law on a “Cosby” episode scheduled to air Nov. 3.

*

Rashad did another commuting gig recently, spending a few weekends in Toronto to film an upcoming movie for Showtime called “Free of Eden,” starring Sidney Poitier. Her part is small but pivotal: Desiree, Poitier’s former wife, currently imprisoned for killing her second husband in self-defense. She took the part because it is chock-full of emotion, and because of Poitier.

“He’s not only a wonderful actor but a wonderful human being,” she gushes. “He has this cooling and brilliant fire inside him. He’s come through another era of filmmaking when people thought about what they were doing and took the time to rehearse. Not bam-bam like today, when you better bring your own motivation to the table because no one has time to talk to you.”

When “Cosby” goes on hiatus in the spring, Rashad will get busy again: She’ll be off to Atlanta for two months to star in a stage production of “Medea.” And there is the constant juggling of work and family: Husband Ahmad Rashad is a sportscaster who is on the road often; they live with their 10-year-old daughter just outside Manhattan.

“My daughter’s been very generous these last two years with my schedule, but I’m home with her as much as I can and that’s where I go every day after work,” says Rashad, who also has a 24-year-old son from a prior marriage. “She’s at a key age when I need to be there to see what’s happening.”

If possible, she’s come to appreciate and cherish time with her children even more since watching Cosby deal with his pain this year after his son was shot to death on a Los Angeles roadside while changing a flat tire. Her tone grows hushed when she recalls the depression that hit everyone who knows the comedian.

“There are some things that words can’t touch,” Rashad says in hushed tones, “and I’ve never talked about it for that reason. Let me just say that it was Bill who made it possible for us to continue.”

* “Cosby” airs Mondays at 8 p.m. on CBS (Channel 2).