No Small Feat

When Camryn Manheim decided to become what she calls “the fat girl who’s not going to take it anymore,” her career took off like a feather in a Santa Ana. Years of struggle to find a place in a Hollywood acting tyranny that practically required a “Baywatch” figure just to get in the door were shed virtually overnight.

As one of the feisty lawyers on ABC’s “The Practice,” she recently earned an Emmy nomination as best supporting actress. More significantly, however, she’s become a role model for many women who don’t and probably won’t ever wear a size 8.

“Most of the large women on television play clowns, and jokes are made about their weight,” Manheim said. “I cannot think of another large woman on a drama who is articulate, bright, courageous, stylish and sexual. I get so many letters from women out there that say, ‘Finally, finally, we’re seeing someone who has dignity and isn’t self-loathing.’

“I love that David [Kelley, creator and executive producer of “The Practice”] doesn’t fixate on my size, but he revisits it now and then, and revisiting it by giving me a boyfriend, like we did at the end of last season, is fabulous.

“I never had role models when I was growing up. As far as I knew, fat girls never dated. It didn’t happen on television, so it didn’t happen in real life.”

What turned it around was in part Kelley’s open mind and willingness to exploit any sensitive issue for dramatic effect. But mostly it was Manheim’s 1993 one-woman New York stage play, “Wake Up, I’m Fat,” which chronicled her own struggle of growing up overweight, that launched her on her way. (She just recently signed a lucrative book deal--enough, she whispered, to be able to buy a house in L.A.--to turn the play into a novel.)

Before that, being fat was dreadful, both personally and professionally--although Manheim, at 5-foot-10 and in her preferred clothes that show off her voluptuous curves and cleavage, is actually a long way from the usual stereotype of obesity.

“To this day, fat people are the last minority who are openly discriminated against without apology, and the play was the catalyst to having me fully embrace myself and not participate in those other myths that my culture has set for me,” Manheim said. “And I believed in those myths as much as anyone else did. It’s a miracle that I’m 37 years old and have any sense of self-worth, given that every image that I’m bombarded with tells me that I’m undesirable. Every magazine cover, every commercial, every bus stop I go by screams that I’m undesirable.

“And there is a billion-dollar industry out there that is invested in making women hate themselves. Because as soon as women start to enjoy themselves as who they are, they are going to stop buying those billion dollars’ worth of products and there is going to be a real economic slump.”

As a student in the theater department at New York University, Manheim said she was always cast as the aging spinsters, the grandmas, the old queen. “That’s what they did with the fat girl,” she said.

For 10 years after that, she struggled in New York, working constantly in tiny downtown theaters but failing to find a television and film agent. “I was 22 years old with a baby face, and you just didn’t ever see any young, fat people on TV,” Manheim explained. “They just didn’t exist.”

Even after landing an agent, her career was still a jumble. When the agent sent her out for parts that called for a large person, she was often told that she wasn’t fat enough: “They didn’t want a 5-10, powerful, amazon woman who had sexuality to her. They wanted some short, obscenely round woman with an upper respiratory problem.”

Finally, her agent simply began sending her up for roles of professionals--doctors or lawyers or teachers. And together they decided to have her audition for parts that called for no-nonsense men. In fact, the first two television roles she ever won, including a guest spot on “Law & Order,” originally were written for a man.

“But I have to honor Roseanne, who I believe paved an incredible road for me. And Kathy Bates and Rosie O’Donnell--but after ‘Roseanne,’ it became OK to have a powerful, bigger woman on television, and I knew there would be a place for me. Prior to that, I really didn’t have much hope that I’d play anything but the second-banana wenches in Shakespeare. But even still, that prejudice against us is still in place in Hollywood, and it’s only on an individual basis that one person might force their way through.”

Even on “The Practice,” Manheim said that she has had to push Kelley and the show’s producers to tackle the weight issue head on. One episode featured John Larroquette as a mentally unstable man who in the script repeatedly referred to Manheim’s character of Eleanor as “Hippo” and “Dumbo.” She said she went to Kelley, not to have him cut those slurs, but to allow her character to fight back. Kelley obliged.

And when Eleanor found a boyfriend, the initial script simply had her walking into the office one morning and telling her colleagues that she’d kissed him the night before.

“So I went into the production office and I said, ‘When Lara Flynn Boyle and Dylan McDermott [two of the show’s lean and sexy stars] kiss, you guys promote it like it’s the most exciting part of the episode. But when I kiss, I’m just talking about it.’ They then changed my scenes to two kisses, with tongue. I’m fighting for equality for big girls.”

Which is why she gets the fan mail.

“Thank you! Thank you,” one letter from a woman named Cheryl began. “Thank you for being a plus-sized woman on prime time who is intelligent, articulate, well dressed and normal! . . . I too am plus-sized, normal, articulate, well dressed, etc., and for the first time have seen myself on TV--someone who works hard, is good at what she does, isn’t obsessing about my size, isn’t the caricature of a large person.”

Another fan named Kate wrote: “I recently read an article stating that the average size woman is a 14. Why then are we constantly bombarded with images of sylph-like women as the ideal? . . . Please keep trying to get the word out. You’re inspiring.”

For Manheim, who comes from a New York-area, Jewish, intellectual, leftist family and who said she spent most of her 20s feeling guilty for not joining the Peace Corps, serving as this kind of role model has enabled her to get over the feeling that being an entertainer is strictly a selfish endeavor.

“Somebody asked me recently, ‘Aren’t you tired of talking about the weight issue?’ And, yeah, I am tired of it, but until I’ve exhausted it for everyone else, I’ll continue to talk about it. I can’t wait to have an interview where someone says, ‘No, no, no, I don’t want to talk about that.’ That will be the best victory of all.”

* Starting this week, “The Practice” airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on ABC (Channel 7).