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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Friday, January 16, 2004

Heaton sees parallels to 'Goodbye Girl' role

By Luaine Lee
Knight Ridder News Service

Patricia Heaton (Debra Ramone in "Everybody Loves Raymond") stars in the TNT movie, "The Goodbye Girl."

Associated Press

'The Goodbye Girl'

6 p.m. tonight, tomorrow and Sunday, 8:15 tonight

TNT

Actress Patricia Heaton was absolutely through with dating actors.

"I'd been with actors before and said, 'I'm going to find a nice businessman who has both feet on the ground, has a steady job,' " she recalls.

When she met actor David Hunt she didn't change her mind. In fact, Hunt sublet his New York apartment to her while he was off doing "Hamlet" in

Baltimore. "We had to stay in touch because of some phone bills, and I had to send him his mail. Or he would come back on a break to get his stuff.

" I just thought he was sort of a dog like all these other actors. Then of course, now we're married with four children. I don't know what happened."

What happened was momentous. Not only has she been married to Hunt for 13 years but she has temporarily forsaken the healthy hearth of "Everybody Loves Raymond" to star (as an actress who's absolutely through with dating actors) in Neil Simon's "The Goodbye Girl."

It's just now, says Heaton, that she realizes the parallels to her own life. As a wretched divorcee who finds herself plagued with yet another struggling actor (Jeff Daniels), Heaton gets to redefine her comic timing in the TNT movie, which premieres tonight.

Being married to a fellow thespian can have its advantages, she admits, as she intertwines her hands in her lap. "He understands what I'm going through as an actor and the demands of our business," she says, dressed in a bright-yellow sheath with bare shoulders and gold heels with pointed toes.

"But I also tend to take on more than I should, because as an actor you feel like, 'Well, you strike while the iron is hot, and we need to keep these things going.' ... He has to kind of pull me back and say, 'We need a break and the family needs a break from all this.'

She may be America's darling for her role as the spunky mom Debra Ramone, but Heaton doesn't find it easy mothering her own four boys — ages 5, 6, 8 and 10.

"They're loud, but they're manageable," she says. "And I think I was meant to be a mother of boys because I like a lot of shoot-'em-up, blow-it-up action stuff. So I enjoy going to the movies with them and showing them movies. They have that vulgar sense of boy-humor. There's something really cute about it I enjoy.

"And boys love their moms," she sighs.

Her husband is no better at "Mr. Mom" chores than any other man, she says. "All men are bad at it. I'm very suspicious of any man who enjoys it." Yet it's been a fact of their lives for the past eight years.

"When we were shooting 'The Goodbye Girl' they all went to England together. He pretty much single-handedly took care of all of them," she said. "They got to bond in a way that wouldn't ordinarily happen because kids tend to go to their moms when they're that age anyway. So this was an opportunity for them to rely solely on their dad. And that was good."

Heaton, 45, lost her mother when she was 12. She and her four siblings were reared by their father, who remarried a few years after her mother's death.

After years of trying to make it as an actress in New York, Heaton moved to Los Angeles. But it wasn't a meaty part or even a juicy contract that brought her eventual peace of mind. It was a trip to a Mexican orphanage.

"That completely changed me," she says. "I went with our church to lay down some grass at the orphanage and we also had a party for the kids. Up to that point I had been completely and obsessively focused on getting acting work. And when I came back from that trip I realized: In the scheme of things it did not matter if I got to be an actress.

"There were other things in life that I could contribute to and make a difference in people's lives that was ultimately more satisfying than me being the center of everything. And it really hit me."

Now in her own life, her children always come first. "My husband and I have tried repeatedly to go to movie premieres. And we have canceled every single one of them because somebody's shadow box is due the next day or their book report or somebody gets sick. So you just really learn the meaning of sacrifice when you have kids. But the payback is so huge it doesn't seem like a sacrifice at all in the big scheme of things."