PASADENA, Calif. _ Scottish actress Ashley Jensen confesses she's always been a competitive perfectionist.
"I used to say I'm not very ambitious, but I spoke to an actor a few years ago and we were talking about when we were growing up, and he said, 'Actually, you're the epitome of ambitious because when you were a Girl Guide (like the Girl Scouts) you said, 'I'm going to have an arm full of badges!'
"And indeed, I did," she says. "And I ran for my region for the Scottish Girl championship. And I think I was quite single-minded and quite a strong little character."
That ambition stood her in good stead when she decided to turn her youthful passion for performing into a lifelong commitment.
"Since I was a child it's been undisputable that I would be an actress when I grew up," she says. "For me, at the age of 10, it was, 'Yes, this is happening. I'm going to be an actress!' I don't know where it came from because I did not come from a theatrical family. I don't come from parents and grandparents who did theater. But I just always knew that was what I wanted to do, and I think I was quite single-minded about doing it. And here I am."
Here she is starring as the plucky PR flack who finds herself heading a detective agency in the bucolic countryside in Season 3 of the popular "Agatha Raisin" series. Three movie-length installments begin streaming on Acorn TV next Monday.
Jensen insists she's not anything like her TV counterpart.
"I think Agatha doesn't take no for an answer and, quite frankly, doesn't care what people think of her. She's quite happy to bully her way into a situation. But I'm more, 'Is everybody all right?' 'Are we OK here?' I think I'm quite maternal, a bit more of a mother hen than Agatha ever would be. I think I'm much more of a people pleaser," says Jensen.
Most Americans remember her from her stint as the high fashion seamstress on "Ugly Betty," or as the slightly dim trouper in "Extras" with Ricky Gervais.
She was married for 10 years to actor Terence Beesley, who died three years ago. Now the mother of a 10-year-old son, Jensen says having a child changed her.
"I used to enjoy flying, but I'm a little bit stressed about flying now that I'm somebody's mum," she says. "I'm much more world-aware now. You're a bit more selfish when you haven't got a little person to worry about, and it's more all about you."
In spite of her determination, Jensen failed her first attempt at entering the National Youth Theatre, but managed on her second try. She remembers the early days, sharing a flat with her best friend from drama school.
"She was behind the scenes in television, she's now a production manager in movies and does very well," says Jensen, 50.
"One of the best things about sharing a flat with her was our wardrobe: 'Have you got a jacket that would go with this shirt?' 'Yes, go and look.' 'Where's that hat?' We had an extended wardrobe. We always had a pot of tea on the go. I remember being so (poor) that we couldn't afford orange juice. Orange juice was decadence," she says.
Jensen borrowed a slow cooker from her mother.
"We would stick some sausages and potatoes in the slow cooker and when we came back we would have this sausage casserole, and we ate a lot of noodles and tuna, pasta, in a cold, cold flat in Edinburgh," she says. "There was no heat. Frost on the inside of the windows. We used heat up our beds with a hairdryer. Then she got an electric blanket for Christmas and I was so jealous ... Those were the days," she sighs.
Jensen's very first role was as a juvenile in "The Crucible." Although she wasn't a kid, she looked very young and came cheaper than hiring a child with the required chaperone. In her initial role on TV she played a girl in a betting shop. Her costar was a beautiful Persian cat who earned more than she did. "My feet were firmly on the ground and I crawled my way up," she laughs.
FALCO JOINS THE FORCE
Edie Falco is back on the side of law and order in CBS' new series "Tommy," premiering Thursday. Falco plays the first female police chief in Los Angeles. Most people remember her as the unflinching Carmela from "The Sopranos," the police officer in "Oz" or the druggie nurse in "Nurse Jackie."
She likes the grind of a network series, she says.
"I come from a long line of workers. I work. I've always worked, since I was a kid. Even on 'Sopranos,' I would work, like, three out of five days. It pissed me off, like, I wanted to be there," she says. "I want to be doing stuff. I want to be there when that funny thing happened on set ... I am built for this kind of thing. I work hard and I work best when I'm working hard. And my kids have grown up on sets. My daughter runs around and hands goodies out to the cast and crew. I love it. I love it. I love it."
Tom Szentgyorgyi, executive producer of the show, reports the writers consulted with some female police chiefs. "One thing they talked about universally was the phrase 'pushback,'" he says.
"That's far too gentle a phrase (for) how much opposition they were faced with when they were put in the seat of power. And one of the things about Tommy that really interests me is that she is ... dedicated to that service in the face of that opposition. That opposition is real and continuous and does not go away, and yet she preserves that sense of honor and duty and service in the face of all that."
While the show is all about the LAPD, it's actually filmed in New York. That's showbiz!
DRESCHER RETURNS IN NBC SITCOM
Twenty-six years after she starred in "The Nanny," Fran Drescher is back on a sitcom for NBC called "Indebted," debuting Thursday. It's about a young married couple who must take in their parents when they show up broke on their doorstep. Drescher says she's up to the task but is finding it a bit taxing.
"It's the same machine, and I'm very used to it," she says. "I did 'Happily Divorced' as well, and ... 'Living with Fran,' and it happens to be a wonderful group of people, and that kind of lifts me in a way that makes me very grateful to be with this company. So it's fun. It's exciting. Physically it gets a little harder, I think, on me. But I don't need to have a life outside of work, so I go home, I lie down with my dog, and that's about it."
Drescher's characters have always been indelibly drawn in the minds of her fans, she says. "I think that I am pretty much a persona that is seen very vividly in all of my characters. For that reason, I think this is the first show I've not been called 'Fran' for many, many years.
"So I made peace with the fact that the audience and my fans fell in love with my energy, my look, my style, my voice, thank God. And if I just experience different people's lives through this, I made peace with the fact that I'm not going to ever be Meryl Streep in my career."
COLD CASE BECKONS AMATEUR SLEUTHS
CBS All Access is presenting what it calls "a 21st century 'Rashomon'" in the new series "Interrogation," premiering Thursday. The episodes are told from different points of view and can be watched in any order. The object is to try to solve a true crime cold case, just the way real detectives might do.
Ernest Dickerson, who directed six of the episodes and is one of the executive producers, explains: "I think everybody is fascinated with true crime stories, because it's sometimes human nature at its best and its worst," he says.
"And you're sometimes wondering, how could people do something like this? How could something like this happen? And just those extremes are fascinating enough without (people) necessarily being obsessive about it.
"We hope it will appeal to folks that want to be a detective, want to act like a detective, want to go through the same thought processes that a detective will go through in investigating a cold case, where you get one thread, one thread of information that leads you to another one, that leads you to another one, that leads you to another one, that eventually takes you to what you think might be the solution."
